Electric vehicle company BYD has announced record sales for the last year, boosted by rising Chinese demand, as well as government trade-in deals.
China’s biggest electric vehicle (EV) maker BYD revealed record sales of both hybrids and EVs worldwide in 2024, supported by soaring domestic demand, as well as the success of government trade-in programmes. The car maker also experienced a spike in consumer interest because of year-end discounts.
This was despite intensifying domestic competition, as a number of smaller Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers ramped up efforts to gain a bigger share of the market.
The company sold 4.27 million new energy vehicles (NEVs) for the full year of 2024, which includes both battery electric vehicles as well as plug-in hybrid ones. This was a surge of about 41.26% from the same period last year, as well as ahead of its previous target of 3.6 million units for the full year 2024.
Passenger NEV sales touched 4.25 million units in 2024, which was a jump of 41.07% from the corresponding period in 2023.
BYD’s battery electric vehicle (BEV) sales also rose approximately 12.08% last year, compared with the full year 2023, amounting to 1.76 million vehicles. Similarly, its passenger plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) sales in 2024 also soared 72.83% on a yearly basis to 2.49 million units.
Catching up with Tesla
Although US EV maker Tesla was still slightly ahead of BYD in terms of battery electric vehicle sales in 2024, at 1.78 million units, the latter is fast catching up, especially given its rapid growth in the last few years.
Tesla has also been facing a number of issues in the last several months, which has supported the rise of other competitors. This includes falling sales, declining investor confidence, and eroding profit margins. A reduction of subsidies, as well as ongoing issues with products such as the Cybertruck has also impacted the company.
In April 2024, the company also announced that it would be laying off 10% of its worldwide employees, as a result of lagging demand, which further hit consumer and investor sentiment.
Chinese EV market continues to see strong growth
The Chinese electric vehicle market recorded solid growth in 2024, boosted not only by established players such as BYD, SAIC and Geely, but also a number of relatively new and smaller companies such as Leapmotor, Li Auto and Xiaomi.
Those smaller companies continued to provide stiff competition to BYD, which still sells the majority of its products domestically. However, other companies such as Nio and Xpeng felt the pinch of the rising competition, when it came to their own sales goals, despite several still seeing good growth.
One of the major reasons for the Chinese EV market still being so strong is due to the various subsidies provided by the government to EV makers. The subsidies also allow a number of Chinese EV makers to sell their products at heavily discounted prices in the EU, and other parts of the world.
Other measures such as government trade-in schemes for older diesel and petrol cars have also gone a long way in boosting EV sales. There has also been a growing interest amongst consumers in the last few years to switch to greener technologies as the energy transition picks up pace.
However, the recent EU tariffs on key Chinese EV makers such as BYD, Geely and SAIC could potentially cause China’s domestic EV market to slow down in the short-term somewhat.
