BYD Electric Car Sales Spike In 1st Half of 2014

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The first half of 2014 saw a big spike in the number of electric cars sold by BYD, according to recent reports — an increase of more than 6 times over.

Altogether, BYD sold more than 7,600 electric cars during those first six months. That’s enough to make the company the top electric car seller in China, with a 37% share of the market during that period of time. Much of the sales growth was due to the company’s Qin model seeing big growth in sales.

 

That’s not to say that the company as a whole saw increases, though — gas-powered cars actually saw a 27% decline in sales. Given that gas-powered vehicles provide BYD with roughly half of its total revenue, that’s quite a hit — and is largely responsible for the company’s 15% drop in net profit as compared to the previous period.

Sustainnovate provides more:

BYD CEO, founder, chairman, and president Wang Chuan Fu, a Zayed Future Energy prize winner who seems to be passionate about moving the world forward toward a clean energy future, followed up on the results by pushing for China to do a better job incentivizing electric car purchases, and it seems China is going to do so. The country might put $16 billion into EV charging infrastructure. Meanwhile, some large cities are also incentivizing industry growth. All new apartment buildings and condos in Shenzhen must include an EV charging station for each parking space. Chuan Fu intends to keep pushing forward with electric cars.

“Given the challenging environment for traditional car sales, we would put more emphasis on our push to boost electric car sales by introducing more new models in the second half,” Chuan Fu commented.

On that note, the company will soon be releasing a new plug-in hybrid SUV dubbed the Tang, as well as a fully electric version of its popular Denza model.

Questions about the company’s future remain, though, with some analysts noting BYD’s relative lack of charging infrastructure (which it is working on) and potential bureaucratic barriers to wider success in the Chinese market.

With the Chinese government’s recent strong words about tackling the enormous pollution problem in the country, though, those limiting factors may more or less solve themselves. The next couple of years should be interesting.