BYDDY
Welcome to the elimination round
BYD’s chairman Wang Chuanfu says China’s electric-vehicle market has moved from a growth party into a full-on cage match. His warning about a “brutal elimination phase” is basically corporate code for: the easy money is gone, and not every EV maker is going to make it out standing.
The profit problem
The company’s 2025 results showed the split-screen reality of the EV business right now. BYD sold a record 4.6 million vehicles, which sounds like the kind of headline that should come with confetti. But net profit still dropped 19% as the price war in China kept eating into margins like a hungry raccoon at 2 a.m.
That matters for investors because volume isn’t the whole story. If you’re moving more cars but making less money on each one, the scoreboard can look a lot less heroic than the sales chart.
Leaner, meaner, more nervous
BYD is responding by tightening the screws internally, including a workforce adjustment of nearly 100,000 employees, or about 10% of staff. That’s not exactly the kind of “efficiency initiative” companies put on a motivational poster, but it signals how seriously BYD is taking the margin squeeze.
The company is betting its vertical integration — batteries, chips, and a giant engineering bench — will help it outmuscle rivals in the long run. Big picture: in China’s EV market, scale used to be the prize. Now survival itself is the prize, and BYD is trying very hard to be the last car standing.