China’s BYD Co (比亞迪) enjoyed a year-end surge to push total sales to 4.25 million passenger cars last year, narrowing its gap with Tesla Inc as the two vie for the crown of top-selling electric vehicle (EV) maker of the year.
The Shenzhen-based carmaker, which stopped making vehicles entirely powered by fossil fuels in 2022, hit a new monthly sales record last month, spurred on by subsidies and offering extra incentives to buyers.
BYD sold 509,440 plug-in hybrid and pure-electric passenger vehicles last month, the company said yesterday. The figure includes 207,734 EVs, taking the annual tally of battery-powered car sales to 1.76 million. Overall annual sales increased 41 percent year-on-year.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The rise of BYD as a best-selling car brand stands in contrast to the turmoil facing a growing number of legacy auto giants like Nissan Motor Co, Volkswagen AG and Stellantis NV. Western car brands have faced tumbling sales in China, while also lagging behind on the EV transition.
Tesla will unveil its fourth-quarter sales figures later this week. The Elon Musk-led company needs to deliver at least 515,000 EVs in the final three months of last year to meet its guidance for “slight growth” in annual sales, or 1.81 million deliveries, which would be a quarterly record for the company. Analyst estimates are for 510,400 deliveries, just shy of Tesla’s expectations.
By the third quarter, BYD had sold 1.16 million EVs, lagging Tesla by 124,100. However, the Chinese company has seen a last-quarter surge to narrow the gap with its US rival.
BYD’s surge will help cement its place among the top-selling carmakers globally. Its rise in total sales puts it near to beating Ford Motor Co and Honda Motor Co on an annual basis too. Higher sales will tip the company’s annual revenue over US$100 billion for the first time.
BYD’s gains have been fueled by domestic Chinese sales — and aided in the second half of the year by increased subsidies to convince drivers to ditch gasoline cars.
Its target to sell roughly half-a-million vehicles outside China has fallen short of expectations in the face of pushback from the European Union, which has imposed additional tariffs on Chinese EVs.
In Brazil, one of its biggest overseas markets, BYD is under scrutiny over allegations of slave-like conditions for some construction workers building a new EV factory.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS