🚗 BYD : The biggest SCAM of the car industry ?

For about 100 years, the global car industry was dominated by 3 countries

— Germany, Japan, and the United States. Out of them came the names that defined

modern driving: Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Ford, Honda, BMW.

These weren’t just companies, they were the pride of entire nations

and the backbone of their economies.

But in the space of 3 years, it's been a bloodbath.

Mercedes watched its profits collapse by 28%.

Porsche lost 92% of its bottom line in a single year.

Stellantis — the group behind Jeep, Peugeot and Fiat —

posted a 26 billion dollar loss, the worst in its history.

Volkswagen announced 50.000 job cuts. Behind every single

one of these blows, the same name keeps coming back.

BYD. A company that,

until 2003, was still producing nothing but simple batteries.

Back then, the very idea that they could one day compete with Tesla was so absurd

that Elon Musk himself couldn't hold back a laugh

when asked about them on live American television.

Today, Musk isn’t laughing anymore.

BYD sells more electric cars than anyone on the planet.

How did a small battery

workshop brought the entire car industry to its knees in less than a decade?

What's their secret weapon?

And why is nobody talking about what's really happening behind the curtain?

Because BYD didn't rise out of nowhere just like that.

There's a lot more to this story… That's exactly why I created this channel.

To talk about the things people get wrong because they've never set foot in Asia.

I've been running businesses here for 26 years.

I see what's happening from the inside.

So if you want the real picture of what's going on, subscribe.

You won't get this anywhere else.

The mistake most people make

is to think this is a story about Chinese brands winning in China.

That would already be bad news for Mercedes and Volkswagen,

but it would still leave them their home turf.

The reality is much worse.

BYD and the other Chinese carmakers aren’t just

dominating Beijing and Shanghai — they're planting their flag

on every continent at the same time, and nobody seems able to stop them.

Start with Southeast Asia, where the shift has been the most brutal.

In Thailand, BYD took 40% of the electric vehicle market in eighteen

months.

Mitsubishi shut down its local factory. Mazda cut production by 60%.

A region that had been a Japanese stronghold

for 40 years flipped in a few years. In Singapore,

one out of every five new cars sold last year is a BYD.

In Malaysia, BYD

became the best-selling electric brand in 2024.

Closer to home, the picture is just as ugly.

Look at Europe, the place Western carmakers thought they’d be safe.

Chinese brands now account for more than 11% of European EV sales,

and the share keeps growing every quarter.

Renault just posted its first net loss in five years and warned

that margins will keep shrinking because of Chinese pressure.

Stellantis is bleeding in its core markets.

Even Audi, the untouchable brand of European luxury, is now losing

customers in China and losing market share at home in Europe at the same time.

Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, had to fly to Beijing with thirty

CEOs behind him — not to sign contracts, but to ask Xi Jinping to stop

suffocating German industry.

20 years ago, it would have been unthinkable.

And there’s the place nobody expected: Brazil. BYD took 72% of the Brazilian

electric vehicle market in a single year and opened a factory

on the site of an old Ford plant the Americans had abandoned.

They’re doing the same thing in Mexico, in Israel, in Norway

— one of the most demanding EV markets in the world,

where the BYD Tang landed straight in the top five best-sellers on launch.

The United States is the only major market where BYD is still blocked,

officially for national security reasons.

And even there, the Americans know it's a holding pattern, not a victory.

Because in every other corner of the planet, the trend is the same.

Wherever BYD shows up, the competition starts falling apart.

Sometimes in months.

Sometimes in weeks. So the real question is: how?

How does a Chinese company most people couldn't

name five years ago pull off something no Western carmaker saw coming?

Cheap labor doesn't explain it —

plenty of other Chinese brands had the same advantage and went nowhere.

What BYD actually built

is the part Mercedes and Toyota should have been studying ten years ago.

And to understand what they built, you need to know who built it.

His name is Wang Chuanfu.

In 1995, he was a 29-year-old engineer who borrowed 40,000 dollars

from his cousin

and rented a small workshop in Shenzhen to start making rechargeable batteries.

Within seven years, he was supplying Motorola and Nokia.

By 2003, BYD

was the biggest battery maker in the world.

That same year, Wang did something nobody understood.

He took the money

and bought a bankrupt state-owned car factory in the middle of nowhere.

His own investors tried to stop him. BYD's stock

dropped by 2.7 billion Hong Kong dollars in two days.

The Chinese business press called it a joke — a battery guy walking

into one of the most capital-intensive industries on the planet.

Wang didn't even have a driving license. But his logic was simple.

The future of the car, he believed, wasn't the engine.

It was the battery.

And nobody on earth knew more about batteries than him.

Everyone else was trying to figure out how to electrify a car.

Wang was trying to figure out how to build a car around something

he already mastered. It would take him 15 years of humiliation

before the rest of the world understood what he was actually doing.

And during those 15 years,

while journalists laughed at his cars and Musk was mocking him

on television, Wang made 3 decisions that would quietly change everything.

The first was to refuse to depend on anyone.

Tesla buys its batteries from Panasonic.

Volkswagen relies on hundreds of outside suppliers

for chips, motors, electronics, even the glass.

BYD decided to build everything in-house — the batteries obviously,

but also the semiconductors, the motors, the power electronics, the windshields,

the headlights, down to the software running inside the dashboard.

When the global chip shortage paralyzed the entire auto industry in 2021, BYD

just turned up the dial on its own chip factories and kept delivering.

When lithium prices exploded,

they were already digging their own in Tibet and South America.

Every crisis that hurt their competitors made them stronger.

The second decision was a bet on the boring option While Tesla

and every Silicon Valley commentator was evangelizing pure electric vehicle,

Wang quietly poured resources into plug-in hybrids — cars

that run on electricity for daily commutes and switch to gasoline for longer trips.

In California it sounded like a compromise.

In most of China, where charging stations were

rare outside the big cities

it was the only thing that actually made sense for hundreds of millions of people.

By the time BYD was selling more PHEVs than Tesla

was selling EVs in total, the Western press was still debating

whether hybrids were even a real technology.

That “compromise” gave BYD access to the 500 million Chinese consumers

Tesla could never touch —

and once they had that volume, the economics of scale did the rest.

The third decision was the one that closed the trap.

In 2020, BYD released the Blade Battery. A different chemistry — lithium

iron phosphate instead of the nickel and cobalt mix everyone else was using.

It was cheaper to produce, it didn't catch fire when you drove a nail

through it, and it lasted longer.

That last part matters more than it sounds.

It meant BYD could sell cars at a lower price than Tesla while claiming

a genuine safety advantage.

Four years later, Tesla started buying batteries from BYD for its own

cars. Let that sink in. The company Musk laughed at on television

is now supplying the batteries inside Teslas. Spoiler alert

they stopped quickly… But you understand that BYD didn't just build better cars.

They built a system the competitors structurally can’t copy. At least

that's the official story.

The one you’ll read in every business magazine,

every Harvard case study celebrating BYD as the next Toyota.

Vertical integration, bold hybrid strategy, breakthrough

battery, amazing ! Except it's not the full story.

Not even close. If you're getting value from this, hit subscribe.

This is exactly the kind of story you won't find on CNBC

because most people covering Asia have never actually worked here.

I have.

For 26 years. That’s why I created this channel.

To share what's really happening in Asia from the inside.

From day one, BYD has been playing a game nobody else on the field was allowed

to play. Between 2015 and 2020 alone, BYD

received roughly 4.3 billion dollars in direct subsidies from the Chinese state.

In 2016, the year they poached their star designer from Audi,

the subsidies they collected from Beijing were higher than the company’s

entire net profit.

Listen to that sentence again.

Without the Chinese government writing checks, BYD wasn't making money

that year — it was losing it.

And it wasn't the only year.

The help came in every form you can imagine.

Free land for factories.

Zero-interest loans from state-owned banks.

Tax breaks on R&D.

Guaranteed public contracts for buses and taxis in hundreds

of Chinese cities Subsidies handed directly to buyers

so that every BYD sold in China came pre-discounted by the state.

At its peak, analysts estimate BYD was pocketing

between 2,000 and 4,000 dollars of public money

for every single vehicle rolling off the line. Now stop for a second

and think about what that means for a company like Volkswagen or Toyota.

When they decide to price a car, they're competing against a rival

whose margin isn't calculated the same way theirs is. BYD

can sell below cost for years and still post a profit,

because the Chinese state is quietly topping up the difference.

That's not a fair market.

This is why Mercedes can't just “build better cars.” It's why

Stellantis can’t just “cut costs harder.” The problem isn't that BYD

is smarter or faster or more innovative — although they are plenty of those things.

The problem is that BYD

is part of a national industrial strategy. Made in China 2025,

the plan Xi Jinping laid out a decade ago, openly named the automotive sector

as one of the ten industries China intended to dominate globally.

BYD is the instrument.

The country is the player. By the time Western governments finally woke up

and started talking about tariffs and investigations, Beijing

had already started winding down the most aggressive subsidies.

Not because anyone forced them to — because the job was done.

The machine was built, the global supply chain was locked in,

and the competition was already on its knees.

The subsidies served their purpose and then quietly disappeared, leaving

Western politicians chasing a problem that had already moved on to its next

chapter. Sadly, for BYD, the cracks are starting to show.

The first one opened up in early 2025, when a small independent research firm

based in Hong Kong called GMT Research published a report that landed