BYD Passes Volkswagen in Battery Electric Cars in October 2021

by

BYD battery EV sales rose 176% to 41,232 units year over year and 13% from September, 2021. October PHEV sales increased from 7,126 units in 2020 to 38,771 in 2021. BYD has also sold over 1000 battery electric buses.

Volkswagen Group delivered 122,100 battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) were delivered to customers from July 1 to Sept 30, an increase of 109% compared with the same period in 2020. This is about 41,000 BEVs per month for the Volkswagen Group.

Volkswagen brand has sold some 167,800 all-electric cars (up 169.2% year-over-year), which is about 57% of the total of 293,100 (Jan-Sept) by the Volkswagen Group. BYD has sold about 200000 battery-electric vehicles from Jan-October 2021.

BYD and Volkswagen Group are second and third behind Tesla. They are each less than half of Tesla production. Tesla delivered 627,000 cars from January to September in 2021.

BYD makes its own batteries and chips.

BYD had a 27% decrease in profitability year over year. $TSLA Q3 2021 revenue was up 57% year on year to $13.76, net income (GAAP) $1.62B up 389%, net income non GAAP $2.1 B up 139%. Volkswagen loses about $4000 for every electric car that they sell. BYD has doubled revenue over the past five years while Tesla has increased revenue by about seven times over five years.

BYD is a strong competitor and will be successful with electric cars. BYD had over three times the monthly battery electric car sales of Nio or Xpeng.

We will see how well BYD keeps pace with Tesla over the two to three years as Tesla ramps up the Austin and Berlin factories.

BYD has one to two years of a solid growth story. BYD had a big drop in battery-electric and plug-in hybrids from the end of 2018 to Feb 2020.

BYD was ahead of Tesla in electric cars four years ago but fell far behind and is now recovering. BYD made more batteries than CATL before but has fallen far behind CATL. CATL is China and the World’s largest battery maker.

In 2019, BYD invested aout US$1.5 billion U.S. dollars to make a new factory Changzhou to produce 400,000 NEVs each year. BYD already had BEV and PHEV factories in Shenzhen, Xi’an and Changsha. In December 2020, BYD announced a new factory for electric vehicle batteries with an annual production capacity of 20 GWh in the city of Bengbu in Anhui province, China. The total investment would be six billion yuan, about 750 million euros (about US$850 million). In first half of 2020, BYD sold 3.2 GWh of batteries.

BYD is the first electric bus manufacturer with an all-union workforce at its cutting-edge facility. BYD invested more than $250 million in an electric bus factory in Lancaster, California and some other US facilities. BYD purchased an additional 150 acres of land near its Lancaster plant and is planning service/maintenance centers across the U.S.

BYD is funding growth by issuing shares and spinning out divisions (plans to spin out chip business and battery business). The chip business IPO planned to raise $414 million and the battery business IPO might be $1-3 billion. BYD is making $800M-$1B in annual net income in 2021 while Tesla will make about $6-7 billion in net income in 2021.

Nextbigfuture thinks BYD can go from 300,000 battery-electric cars in 2021 to 500,000 to 650,000 battery-electric cars in 2022. BYD could surprise and get closer to 1 million BEVs if their low price Dolphin EV is successfully ramped. Tesla will go from 920,000-940,000 battery-electric cars in 2021 to about 1.8 million to 2.2 million battery-electric cars in 2022.

SOURCES – BYD, Insider EVs
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com (Brian owns shares of Tesla)