BYD Boss Says Company Will Outsell Toyota Within Five Years
The chairman of BYD says the company's second-generation Blade Battery will be key to its future growth
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by Brad Anderson
BYD will need to increase its sales by 1 million each year to rival Toyota.
Last year, BYD sold 4.6 million cars, making it China’s largest automaker.
Its sales are down in China this year, so it will need to grow internationally.
BYD was the world’s sixth-largest car manufacturer last year, but it wants more. Not satisfied with simply building more cars than Ford, wants to become the world’s largest car manufacturer, outselling the Volkswagen Group and Toyota.
The company’s chairman, Wang Chuanfu, said that the brand wants to become the world’s largest car manufacturer within just five years. He made the revelation during the brand’s annual shareholder meeting in Shenzhen, stating that the firm’s new second-generation Blade Battery will be key to the firm’s expansion.
Read: BYD Wants To Sell Humanoid Robots Right Next To Its Cars
“BYD will truly become the No. 1 automaker globally in terms of scale in five years,” he said during the event, notes .
Combating Sliding Shares?
Of course, making such a bold statement is much easier than actually becoming the world’s largest car manufacturer. It’s likely that BYD’s boss took a leaf out of Elon Musk’s playbook, making such a proclamation to bolster the car manufacturer’s share price, which has slipped more than 45 percent over the past year.
BYD would need to grow extraordinarily quickly over the next five years to achieve its objective. Last year, the brand sold 4.6 million vehicles, less than half of the 11.21 million sold by Toyota Motor Corporation when Lexus and Daihatsu are included. Toyota alone sold 9.6 million cars last year, so to rival it, BYD will need to grow its sales by 1 million units each year for the next five years. That’ll be an extraordinarily difficult task.
This objective will be affected by the broad cooldown across , which has slowed BYD’s local growth. In May, it sold 207,372 vehicles in China alone, down 29.2 percent year-over-year. To make up for lower demand in its home nation, BYD will have to rapidly expand into new international markets, with Canada primed to be one of the most important.
