A remarkable shift in the automotive industry: in the last quarter of 2023 Chinese car manufacturer BYD sold more electric cars than the American Tesla. It is the first time that Tesla is no longer the global market leader in electric cars and it marks the growing importance of Chinese brands in this market.
On Monday, January 1, BYD announced that it had sold 526,000 fully electric cars in the last quarter. That was a big end-of-year sprint: in the third quarter there were still just over 400,000 cars.
On Tuesday, Tesla, Elon Musk's car company, released figures. It sold 484,000 electric cars in the last quarter. That was more than the previous quarter and more than analysts had expected, but still much less than BYD. For the entire year of 2023, Tesla sold more electric cars than BYD.
BYD is an abbreviation of Build Your Dreams. The brand from the southern city of Shenzhen was founded in the 1990s and has a domestic market share of about one-third in the electric and hybrid car market (Tesla fluctuates around 10 percent in China). It also owns parts of the battery chain, which means it can produce relatively cheaply. Well-known investor Warren Buffett has owned shares in BYD for years.
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BYD is much less known outside China, but it is now working on internationalization. Although Chinese brands lacked the connection with fuel cars decades ago, the country made an early move towards electric driving and these models are considered high-quality and cheap. China is now trying to make the leap to Europe.
In the Netherlands too
In the Netherlands, BYD electric buses operate in some regions. Passenger cars are now also for sale here. By 2023, there would be 1,230 electric BYD models registered in the Netherlands, compared to two hundred a year earlier. For comparison: almost twenty thousand Teslas were registered in the Netherlands in 2023.
The rise of Chinese brands in Europe is controversial. It is an open secret that the sector has benefited from enormous amounts of state aid, which means there is no fair competition. The European Commission therefore announced in the autumn of 2023 that it would be conducting an investigation into this.
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