BYD sales exceed 200,000 units in April, up nearly 100% year-on-year

On May 2, BYD announced a sales report showing that BYD sold 210,300 new energy vehicles in April, an increase of 98.3% compared to the same period last year. Among them, passenger car sales were 209,500 units, up 98.6% year-on-year.

The previous BYD quarterly report showed that in the first quarter of this year, BYD achieved revenue of 120.17 billion yuan, up 79.8% year-on-year; net profit attributable to the mother was 4.13 billion yuan, up 410.8% year-on-year; net cash flow from operating activities was 14.466 billion yuan, up 21.2% year-on-year.

BYD said that the increase in operating income is mainly due to the growth in sales of new energy vehicles. In the first quarter of this year, BYD sales achieved 552,000 units, an increase of more than 90% year-on-year, of which sales in March exceeded 200,000 units in a single month. 762,400 new energy vehicles were sold from January to April, an increase of 94.3% compared to the same period last year.

For 2023, BYD Chairman and President Wang Chuanfu said at the 2022 results conference to become China's largest automaker at the end of this year.

To achieve these goals, BYD continues to lay out in various market segments. In the high-end market, BYD with the new technology to support the Rangoon and Tenshi brands to impact the luxury new energy vehicle market with higher price premium capacity. In the mainstream mid- to high-end market, BYD continues to capture the fuel car market through its models with the same price strategy as fuel cars.

Gross margin exceeded 17% in the first quarter, and R&D expenses doubled in a single quarter

In the first quarter of this year, BYD's new energy passenger car sales remained the main force, with cumulative sales of more than 540,000 units. By model, the first quarter sales of plug-in hybrid models about 283,300 units, doubled year-on-year; pure electric model sales of 264,700 units, an increase of 84.78%.

Passenger car export business has become a new growth point for BYD, with a total of about 38,700 passenger cars exported from January to March. In March this year, BYD entered the new energy passenger car market in Jordan. At present, BYD's new energy passenger cars have entered 51 countries and regions around the world, including Japan, Germany, Australia and Brazil.

According to the China Passenger Vehicle Association, BYD's share of the new energy passenger car market reached 38.7% in the first quarter, 28 percentage points higher than Tesla, which ranked second, according to the retail volume. And this market share gap is almost the top five sales of the remaining four new energy car companies (Tesla 10.4%, BAE 6.1%, SAIC-GM Wuling 5.9%, Changan Automobile 4.6%) the market share of the sum.

Tesla's global electric vehicle deliveries in the first quarter of this year were 423,000 units, up 36% year-on-year and a record high. In the Chinese market, data released by the China Passenger Vehicle Association showed that Tesla China retail sales in the first quarter were 137,000 units, up 26.9% year-on-year.

Thanks to the growth in sales, BYD and Tesla's revenue also rose in the first quarter. BYD's revenue in the first quarter reached 120.17 billion yuan, up 79.8% year-on-year, while Tesla's revenue in the first quarter reached $23.33 billion (about 161.53 billion yuan), up 24% year-on-year.

It is worth mentioning that the cost advantage brought by the scale effect, as well as thanks to the decline in the cost of new energy vehicles per vehicle driven by the decline in the price of lithium carbonate, BYD's profit per vehicle continued to grow. Revenue per vehicle and profit per vehicle reached RMB 170,000 and RMB 0.67 million in the first quarter of this year, with profit per vehicle increasing by about 170% year-on-year. However, the wave of price cuts and promotions in the domestic car market spread in the first quarter, and BYD also followed other new energy players to launch model discounts, which affected the YoY growth rate of profit per vehicle to a certain extent.

Nevertheless, the increase in BYD's net profit exceeded 400% again in the first quarter of this year, and the net profit of RMB 4.13 billion exceeded the full-year profit level of 2021, which also exceeded the sum of net profit of last year's first and second quarters. RMB and RMB 3.045 billion.

Gross profit margin also increased by about 5.5 percentage points year-on-year to 17.86% in the first quarter of this year, and the gap with Tesla is gradually narrowing. In the first quarter of this year, Tesla's multiple adjustments to the selling price of its models caused its automotive business gross margin to fall nearly 12 percentage points to 21.1% compared to 32.9% in the first quarter of last year.

In addition, it is worth mentioning that BYD's R&D expenses reached RMB 6.238 billion in the first quarter of this year, an increase of 164.24% year-on-year.

The 2022 annual report shows that BYD's R&D expenses reached RMB 18.654 billion last year, up 133.44% from RMB 7.991 billion in the same period of 2021; it accounted for about 4.4% of the overall operating revenue. Its R&D investment projects mainly include blade battery technology, CTB battery-body integration technology, Tesseract energy storage system, DMi super hybrid technology, DiLink 4.0 and easy four-way technology.

"BYD's goal is to become China's No. 1 automaker by the end of this year!" At the 2022 results conference held in March this year, Wang Chuanfu said BYD is targeting 3 million units in sales this year.