Chinese car giant BYD has said it aims to become the world’s largest carmaker in the next five years.
Taking aim at Toyota’s long-held top position, BYD founder and chair Wang Chuanfu said he believed it could overtake global rivals through rapid advances in battery technology and fast charging, as well as increased production overseas, including in Europe.
“BYD will truly become the number one automaker globally in terms of scale in five years,” he said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Shenzhen.
Overnight the company announced plans to spend around £1.8bn in Europe to develop infrastructure for five-minute “flash charging” of its cars.
The company based in southern China overtook Tesla as the world’s largest EV maker by sales last year. It sold more than 160,000 vehicles overseas in May, up 80 percent from last year. It aims to sell 1.5 million vehicles overseas this year, up 40 percent from last year’s 1.05 million.
In 2025, Toyota retained its crown as the world’s best-selling automaker with 11.3 million vehicles, while BYD sold 4.8 million vehicles.
The company’s top international executive, Stella Lee, told reporters separately in London that the company will begin assembling cars at its new plant in Hungary in the fourth quarter of this year.
He also said BYD has halted work on a plant in Turkey while it focuses on production in the European Union, where locally assembled cars will help defeat Brussels tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) introduced two years ago.
“Hungary is the first priority at the moment. The second priority will be to focus on finding a second,” he told Reuters. [production] Convenience in Europe.”
BYD in Hungary recently faced allegations that EU employment laws are being violated, as it races to build its first European factory using Chinese migrant workers.
It also faces claims that soil excavated from the factory site in Szeged was dumped on nearby fields, potentially contaminating it. The local authorities ordered the destruction of the affected crops.
Earlier this week, a spokesman for Csongrád-Csanád county confirmed that authorities had imposed sanctions on three companies involved in the construction of the factory and fined at least one of them. However, the results of the investigation have not yet been made public, said China Labor Watch, which investigated the workers.
BYD is also facing pressure in the US, where the Pentagon overnight added it to a list of “Chinese military companies” that pose a national security threat to the US. Many of these businesses are in direct competition with large American companies.
China responded on Wednesday by saying it believes its addition to the US list “lacks factual basis”.
