Chinese carmaker BYD’s successes continue to swell and earlier this week, it revealed that profits for the first half of this year soared 204.7% compared to last year. It also remains China’s best-selling car manufacturer but has not yet overtaken Tesla as the world’s largest manufacturer of battery-electric vehicles.
The company reported net earnings for the first half of 2023 of 10.95 billion yuan or $1.5 billion. That is a significant increase from the 3.6 billion yuan ($493 million) of H1 2022. In addition, BYD’s profit jumped 144% in the second quarter to 6.82 billion yuan having already jumped fivefold in the first quarter.
Read: BYD Sold A Record 1.25 Million PHEVs And EVs In The First Half Of The Year
In July it was revealed that BYD sold a total of 1,255,637 passenger EVs and PHEVs during the first half of the year. Q2 proved to be particularly fruitful for the brand as it sold 700,244 EVs and PHEVs. Of these, 352,162 were battery-electric vehicles while the remaining 348,081 were plug-in hybrids. This year, BYD has sold a total of 612,425 battery-electric vehicles and of these, 10% were exports. While these figures are impressive, Tesla continues to lead the EV sales race and in the first half of this year managed to sell 889,015 vehicles.
Reuters notes that profitability remains under pressure from the price war that Tesla started earlier in the year. Indeed, calculations reveal that BYD has launched updated versions of eight of its vehicles since February and the prices of them are 4-25% lower than the old versions. BYD’s gross profit margin in the second quarter hit 18.73%, a slight increase from the 17.86% of the first quarter.
BYD built its 5 millionth new energy vehicle (NEV) in the second week of August. It reached this milestone just nine months after it built its 3 millionth NEV. The brand currently sells its passenger NEVs in 54 countries.
