BYD One of the biggest EV manufacturers in the world, BYD, joined the Indian passenger car market this week as part of a bigger initiative to expand outside of China and more than treble its distributor network in the world’s second-most populated nation by the end of next year.
BYD, which has its headquarters in Shenzhen, expects to sell 15,000 of its recently released BYD-ATTO 3 SUVs in India over the course of the following year and “to establish up a local manufacturing facility in the due course,” according to a statement from Ketsu Zhang, executive director of BYD India.
This year, BYD, which is more than 7% owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, overtook Tesla as the largest EV manufacturer in the world. BYD said new energy vehicle sales rose by nearly three times to 201,259 in September from a year earlier earlier this month. Due in part to the strength of its own battery supplies, BYD sales for the first nine months of the year increased by 250% year over year to 1.18 million electric vehicles, overcoming industry disruption brought on by Covid-related lockdowns in Shanghai in the second quarter. Despite not having the same global brand recognition as Tesla, they has accelerated its international growth this year with initiatives in Thailand and Japan; India is the most recent move.
Compared to its EV competitors, BYD’s entire business is more diversified because it also produces handset components and photovoltaics. On the Forbes Global 2000 list of the top publicly traded firms in the world earlier this year, BYD was rated No. 579. This year, its market cap has occasionally surpassed the sum of GM and Ford.
They started doing business in India in 2007 and has since invested more than $200 million in two factories there. It currently has 24 showrooms spread across 21 Indian cities and plans to grow to at least 53 showrooms by the end of 2023, according to the business. According to Sanjay Gopalakrishnan, senior vice president of BYD India, “We are on track toward establishing a better ecosystem that enables EV adoption in our country.”
The chairman of, Wang Chuanfu, has a net worth of $19.3 billion as of today, according to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List. Both BYD director Xia Zuoquan and vice chairman Lu Xiangyang, Wang’s cousin and the head of investment firm Youngy Investment Holding, are worth $15.3 billion and $3.5 billion, respectively.
