By WANG Miqi, WU Qingqing
Among the top 10 auto companies by market value in 2022, BYD took the top spot with a market value of 970.8 billion yuan (US$145billion), surpassing the combined value of the second to fourth places on the list.
In cumulative sales from January to May, XPeng ranked sixth and saw a year-on-year growth rate second only to BYD, while Li Auto saw a growth rate of 111.13 percent.
In the first half of 2022, BYD sold 641,400 EVs, up 315 percent, while Tesla delivered 564,000 vehicles globally, up 46 percent.
BYD maintains its position as the independent leader of domestic EVs and has surpassed Tesla to become the global EVs sales leader.
BYD announced its EV sales target in 2022 is between 1.1 million and 1.2 million units, including 600,000 BEVs and 500,000 to 600,000 PHEVs. In the year's first half, BYD achieved more than half of the target sales.
For Tesla, its global deliveries fell 18 percent quarter-on-quarter, and it missed its 50 percent delivery growth forecast by 4 percent, putting pressure on deliveries to increase in the second half of 2022.
Tesla’s new auto plants in the US and Germany have struggled to ramp up production due to battery shortages and blocked supplies of battery-making tools, leading to billions of dollars in losses.
For now, Tesla’s Gigafactory in China is using a double-shift system for closed production. At the same time, its capacity utilization rate returned to 100 percent in early June, making it the most productive month ever.
In the first half of this year, many BYD factories were put into operation, and the production and sales exceeded 100,000 units in March. As the national pandemic eased in June, BYD’s EV sales reached 134,000, a record high for the company.
However, BYD’s EV profitability did not surpass Tesla’s. Its automotive segment gross margin fell from 25.2 percent in 2020 to 17.39 percent in 2021, while in 2021, Tesla’s gross margin was 29.3 percent, up 3.7 percent from 2020.
