BYD Chairman: We'll Beat Toyota!
BYD's chairman Wang Chuanfu stood up at the company's annual shareholder meeting in Shenzhen on June 9 and said something that most automotive executives would not put on record: that his company will become the world's largest automaker within five years. It was a direct shot at Toyota, which sold 11.3 million vehicles in 2025 against BYD's 4.8 million, making the gap between them more than double in volume terms.
The target Wang is setting means BYD would need to roughly match or exceed Toyota's current scale by around 2030 or 2031. That is not a small ask. It would require BYD to sustain a compounded growth rate that goes well beyond what it has managed even in its strongest recent years, at a time when the Chinese domestic market is increasingly competitive and electric vehicles are facing pushback in some global markets through tariffs.
Wang's pitch to investors rested on two pillars: battery technology and fast charging. BYD's second-generation blade battery and its rapid-charging technology are the two areas where the company believes it holds a hardware edge.
The plan is for these advances to drive growth both at home in China and internationally, particularly in markets like Europe, South-East Asia and South America where BYD has been building scale.
On fast charging specifically, BYD has plans to spend around £1.8 billion building five-minute flash chargers in Europe, an infrastructure push that would support vehicle sales in a market where charging anxiety remains a real barrier for buyers.
The shareholder meeting statement came in a context that Wang was clearly trying to manage. BYD's share price has been under pressure, and the chairman's public confidence play was aimed as much at steadying investor nerves as at laying out a genuine roadmap. He confirmed the number one target but the company did not provide further detail when pressed by international media.
The scale of what BYD needs to achieve makes this worth examining carefully. From 4.6 million vehicles in 2025, getting to Toyota's current 11.3 million within five years would mean growing by about 145 percent.
Even if Toyota's overall volume stays flat or dips slightly in the shift towards EVs, BYD would still need to add around 6.7 million units to its annual sales tally. That gap is roughly the entire annual sales volume of a company like GM or Stellantis, added on top of what BYD already sells today.
BYD's sales trajectory has been steep, going from a domestic EV specialist to a genuine global brand in under a decade. But the next phase of growth is harder because it depends on cracking markets where legacy brands have decades of dealer infrastructure, trust, and financing ecosystems in place. In a market like this one, BYD is still finding its feet, with limited product range and a brand perception that is still forming.
Wang's five-year claim may ultimately prove aspirational rather than precise, but it sends a clear signal to Toyota, Volkswagen and every other automaker: BYD is not slowing down, and it is not content with being a regional player.