Snatching Toyota.
Writer｜Hu Chengxu Editor｜Mao Shiyang
Auto Pixel (ID:autopix)Original
June 9, like in previous years, BYD held its 2025 Annual Shareholders' Meeting at its headquarters in Pingshan, Shenzhen.
More people came than in previous years, so the company temporarily moved the venue from a meeting room to the hall usually used for press conferences. Wang Chuanfu said on stage that nearly 1,000 people attended today, the most in history.
During the Q&A session, a long-term shareholder with heavy stakes stood up. He wanted to know where the company would head next.
In Wang Chuanfu's answer, a word appeared for the first time: "Global No. 1". He said that in the next three to five years, BYD will continue to grow. After five years, in terms of scale, it will achieve "true Global No. 1".
Not No. 1 in New Energy, not No. 1 in China, but No. 1 in total vehicle scale including Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai Kia, etc.
When saying this, BYD was experiencing the biggest deceleration since the New Energy era. In the first five months of 2026, BYD sold 788,000 vehicles domestically, down 43.3% year-on-year. The Chinese market is becoming increasingly difficult to provide the incremental growth it enjoyed in the past.
So Wang Chuanfu's goal truly points to overseas.
Take a closer look at what BYD has done in the past two to three years, this goal is not strange. Its playbook no longer resembles that of a company only wanting a seat at the table overseas.
01
What BYD Wants to Grab,
is the Base of Toyota, Hyundai, et al.
To understand how far BYD is from its goal, one must first look at the gap.
Today, the global No. 1 in auto sales is Toyota, selling a bit over 10 million a year; BYD sold 4.6 million vehicles in 2025, ranking sixth globally. There is a gap of more than 5 million vehicles in between, roughly equivalent to creating another BYD of today's scale on top of its existing volume.
As for this extra 5 million-plus vehicles, what is certain is that most of it will not come from the domestic market.
In 2025, China's New Energy penetration rate reached 53.9%, approaching the ceiling; BYD's domestic sales that year fell instead of rose, down by over 300,000 vehicles compared to 2024.
Geely, Chery, and Changan are all chasing, and this local board is nearly at its peak, with limited incremental growth left to extract. The growth gap is thus pushed overseas as a whole. Outside China, the global New Energy penetration rate is still just over 11%.
But "overseas" is never a single block; its biggest chunks happen to be where BYD cannot enter. The US uses tariff and regulatory barriers to seal off the world's largest and most profitable market; Japan and South Korea are fortresses of local brands, hard for outsiders to pry open; India blocks Chinese cars out with high tariffs and entry barriers.
What remains available are South America, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Australia, the UK, Gulf States, as well as parts of Europe and Mexico. The market set is smaller, and the share burden for each location to reach is heavier.
And these open markets are none of them empty fields.
Southeast Asia is Toyota's home court, where it holds nearly 40% share; BYD has only just squeezed into the top 3 in Thailand. Australia is even more extreme, with Toyota holding sales No. 1 for 23 consecutive years, sales at two and a half times the second place; Gulf States are the common dominion of Toyota and Hyundai Kia, where Toyota's market share is champion in countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Oman.
Only in Brazil is the stock held by Stellantis, Volkswagen, Hyundai Kia, and Renault.
List the owners of these markets one by one, names will repeat constantly; the most frequent is Toyota, followed by Hyundai Kia, then Volkswagen, Stellantis, and other European automakers.
So the overseas granary BYD wants to grab is a very specific existing stock, the base built up over decades of fuel cars by Japanese and Korean automakers.
What it truly wants to replace is RAV4, Corolla, Elantra, Creta and similar economy, durable, high-volume cars sold for decades, using its own DM-i PHEV and Blade Battery EV to replace them one by one within the highest-volume price bands in each market.
Straighten out the chain, and the slogan "Global No. 1" landing on the ground is actually a simpler sentence: BYD must take the home base they've sold for decades within the Toyota and Hyundai Kia base.
This is a ruthless fight; how many opportunities does it have?
02
Wang Chuanfu Writes Growth into a Production Schedule
Faced with questions like "how to go from sixth to first", Wang Chuanfu's habit is to rewrite it as a supply-side arithmetic problem.
On June 9, what he talked about most was not the market, but production capacity. He said how many cars can be sold this year depends on how many batteries can be built; the capacity of the 2nd Gen Blade Battery is climbing month by month, adding 20,000 to 30,000 sets each month; production capacity will be released on a large scale by 2027, and both domestic and overseas markets will see volume increases.
An issue that should be about market and product was interpreted by him as "how much I can make". In his narrative, demand seems assumed sufficient, and the bottleneck lies on his production lines.
Wang Chuanfu seems to believe that if the technology curve of domestic New Energy in the past three years reenacts overseas, the remaining problems can be left to the production schedule.
This logic can explain BYD's overseas layout over the past two years.
It has at least six factories under construction or planned overseas: the Brazil Camaçari plant is a renovation of an old factory exited by Ford, secured in 2023, with the first car rolling off the line in July 2025, targeting 300,000 capacity by end of 2026; the Thailand plant started production in 2024, with an annual capacity of 150,000; the Hungary Szeged plant serves as Europe HQ; Turkey plans to invest 1 billion USD (potentially delayed); Uzbekistan and Indonesia each have points set up.
BYD's playbook's starting point is a bet on speed.
Looking back at BYD's rise domestically, it relied on technology first. In 2021, the 4th Gen DM-i made PHEV the same price as same-level fuel cars with lower fuel consumption; the Blade Battery simultaneously solved safety and cost, with PHEV annual sales jumping from 270,000 to over 2 million vehicles in two or three years.
During those years, China's New Energy market was almost empty; whoever put electric cars that were easy to use and cheap on shelves first could capture whole chunks of incremental growth.
This playbook continues to now. At this year's shareholders' meeting, Wang Chuanfu said "I spend about half my time every week swimming in the ocean of technology", believing he is "one of the 120,000 engineers inside BYD".
But now this playbook's process of converting to sales is not so smooth. Geely, Chery, Leapmotor have caught up one by one; DM-i is no longer a secret technique; not just BYD makes Flash Charge.
Technology is becoming more homogeneous, approaching the physical ceiling further; taking half a step forward brings less and less sales.
Overseas is another matter. Outside China, New Energy is still at the starting point BYD faced years ago: low penetration, few good cars, high prices, most markets still dominated by fuel cars.
The technology curve that once lifted BYD to sixth globally has barely started climbing overseas. What BYD wants to do is take the most advantageous position before this curve rises, copying the success already verified domestically exactly onto a larger plate.
This explains why the overseas game is played heavily and urgently. BYD judges the window period is limited; once overseas New Energy also ramps up, pursuers will flood in as they did domestically, and the time left for first movers might not be longer.
It is unwilling to spend time waiting for the market to mature, and even less willing to hand over initiative.
This June, foreign media claimed BYD is considering acquiring an old European factory, having looked at "many factories" in Europe and is talking with automakers including Stellantis.
BYD prefers independently operated factories; it wants to take over brownfield factories that can be quickly renovated and operated independently with clear ownership and operational boundaries, rather than getting stuck again in existing European auto JV, leasing, or multi-party interest structures.
Key factories and supply chain self-led; distribution and brand also controlled by self as much as possible, serving efficiency and speed. It would rather not have risk-sharing partners first, and have a decision chain that can drive the fastest.
The Brazil old factory renovation took only 16 months from groundbreaking to first car off the line. Export modules are the same; a 6 to 8-ship fleet brings overseas logistics into its own hands. On the channel end, BYD took an equity stake in a Thai local dealer, bound a dealer group with over 100 stores in Latin America; UK authorized stores increased from 52 to 125 in one year, and signed a 100,000 unit deal with Uber.
Following this logic, overseas moves connect into a line. The strategy Wang Chuanfu launched is a replicable template; this is why when asked about sales, he answers with "production schedule" logic.
Whether it holds ultimately rests on that most fundamental judgment: the technology-pulled market curve, how steep it was domestically in recent years, will be equally steep in many overseas markets in coming years.
As long as this judgment holds, simplifying the problem into a production schedule is the fastest solution.
03
BYD VS Geely
Same Overseas Expansion, Different Betting Methods
A easily occurring misunderstanding is summarizing BYD's overseas expansion as "more valued" than Chery or Geely.
In terms of aggressiveness, all three are actually neck and neck. In terms of overseas volume, Chery sold 1.34 million vehicles overseas in 2025, nearly 300,000 more than BYD, sitting on the Chinese passenger vehicle export champion spot for over 20 consecutive years; in terms of capital courage, Geely has bought all the way from Volvo, Lotus, Polestar to a powertrain JV with Renault.
The real difference is not in the degree of aggressiveness, but in the strategic judgment behind the aggressiveness.
Chery bets on export breadth: complete vehicle export plus semi-knocked-down assembly, spreading cars to corners others can't reach, essentially an asset-light playbook.
Geely bets on capital and alliances; Li Shufu is more like an allocator. He grabs core capabilities on one side, polishing smart and New Energy tech to optimal; on the other side, he takes shares and makes allies, seeking leverage at the factory and channel levels.
▍Li Shufu
This year, Geely's Qianli Haohan G-ASD obtained EU UN R171 certification, becoming the first Chinese ADAS system to pass this regulatory certification; equipped models can be sold in the EU without country-by-country re-certification.
At the same time, Geely integrated Gothenburg and Frankfurt R&D teams, established Geely Technology Europe, planning to compress the launch time gap between China and overseas models from over a year to within 6 months.
Also this year, Lynk & Co's Europe sales reuse Volvo resources; Geely in South Korea and South America reuses Renault resources. Gan Jiayue of Geely Automobile has said, Chinese brands going overseas is not to "conquer", but to "walk in", local JVs, reusing local resources to make win-wins, this is the natural expression of this logic.
Behind the three choices are three strategic judgments, and also three judgments on where the moat should be built.
Geely's judgment on tech replacement is not so anxious. In March this year, at the Geely Holding FY2025 performance press conference, CEO Gui Shengyue said the future economy passenger car market will likely be replaced by robotaxis. Shortly after, Geely became one of Nvidia's automotive partners.
This judgment shows Geely does not see today's New Energy competition as the final outcome. It believes there will be longer tech rearrangements after the auto industry, so it is more willing to keep elasticity using cooperation and capital allocation.
Because of this difference, Geely is not anxious to raise "No. 1", nor will it compress the time to first to five years. It is more like betting on the future rather than pressing all chips on this current New Energy replacement round. So Geely's choices overseas are almost the opposite of BYD's: willing to accept slower, more dispersed, more complex.
BYD wants to maximize scale with batteries, factories, fleets, and channels; Geely is more willing to take more positions in tech routes, regional markets, and partnership relationships.
04
The Other Side of the Production Schedule
Reaching No. 1 in scale is a goal setting, a strategic judgment, and will eventually become a structure.
In 2026, Geely, Chery, Changan, Great Wall almost all offered oil-electric hybrids, to grab Toyota THS share in markets with inconvenient charging,唯独 BYD absent.
Technically it is not incapable. This round of HEV by Chinese automakers is not replicating Toyota THS. It bypasses engines, planetary gears, and long-term calibration that old auto giants are good at, pulling the battlefield back to electric drive systems more familiar to Chinese automakers, downsizing batteries, removing external charging, keeping the PHEV low fuel logic, becoming a hybrid that doesn't need charging.
But BYD chose not to do it, turning to laying charging facilities overseas.
In March this year, BYD booked a stadium with 18,000 seats to launch the 2nd Gen Blade Battery, simultaneously launching the plan "Flash Charge China, Change the World". Wang Chuanfu spoke alone for an hour and a half; the press conference dragged from two hours to three hours; it set a year-end goal to build 20,000 flash charge stations domestically, with capital expenditure in the billions, and changed flash charge stations to integrated storage and charging solutions with built-in storage cabinets, bypassing the trouble of applying to the grid for capacity expansion, deploying on three parking spots.
From year-end, these piles will start spreading overseas; the MW-level network in Europe has already been demonstrated at the Munich Auto Show.
Building charging piles in target markets is the latest chapter in BYD's overseas line, possibly the most money-burning chapter. BYD bets that once the charging network is laid out, the transitional form matters less. Others keep hybrids; BYD chooses not to bet on multiple fields, pressing all chips on this New Energy transition round.
Put these together, it is a consistent logic: growth is punched out section by section from factories, technology, and charging piles.
BYD is almost the only domestic automaker highly controlling everything from supply chain vertical integration to overseas assets. This heavy asset model makes scale a must-do; in this dimension, sales "No. 1" is just a byproduct.
Vertical integration is only worth it when spread to world-class scale; maintaining a fleet requires enough exports to fill it; building cell capacity at that level requires enough whole vehicles to digest it; investing billions to lay 20,000 charging piles requires enough installed base to feed it.
Chery can stop at export champion; Geely can be a large enough multi-brand group; if BYD's scale is not larger than them, the efficiency of this setup cannot be guaranteed.
This gives BYD the possibility to challenge for Global No. 1, and makes it very hard to accept a "not big enough" result.
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