BYD claims 1.02 million employees as chairman credits vertical integration amid rising overseas sales

Wang Chuanfu's headcount claim and what he attributes it to

BYD now has more than 1.02 million employees, according to chairman Wang Chuanfu, who shared the figures on stage at the China Society of Automotive Engineers' 33rd annual conference. Electrek, which reported the remarks, notes that figure is larger than Toyota, GM, Ford and Tesla employ combined. Wang told the conference that up to 120,000 of those employees are R&D engineers working on battery cells, motors, electronic controls and semiconductors. ¹

In Wang's account, reported by Electrek, keeping batteries, chips and motors in-house is what carried BYD from its origins as a battery maker to the world's top-selling new energy vehicle brand several years running, and he described the company's rise as a microcosm of China's auto industry moving from follower to leader. The workforce claim comes from the chairman himself rather than an independently audited figure, though Electrek cross-references it against company annual-report numbers and S&P Global Market Intelligence data. The Teardown's company timeline records BYD was founded in Shenzhen in 1995 as a rechargeable battery maker, matching CarExpert's account of a company founded as a battery manufacturer in 1995 before entering vehicle production in 2003. ¹³⁴

A workforce that has swung sharply in four years

Electrek's report traces an uneven headcount trajectory: about 570,100 employees at the end of 2022, 703,500 at the end of 2023, more than 900,000 by September 2024 and 968,900 at the end of 2024. BYD's 2025 annual report then showed roughly 869,600 employees at year-end, a drop of about 99,000 that Electrek says fell mostly in frontline production roles. ¹

The rebound has been rapid. Data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence and cited by Electrek put BYD at 911,900 employees at the end of June 2026, meaning the company added more than 100,000 people in about four months to reach Wang's 1.02 million claim. That hiring has continued while vehicle sales have fallen: BYD sold 3,131,576 vehicles in the first nine months of 2026, down 3.9 per cent year-over-year, with first-half revenue of 344.8 billion yuan and net profit of 12.3 billion yuan both down year-over-year, according to the same report. ¹

Why headcount comparisons are not like-for-like

Electrek cautions that BYD's headcount is not simply a car company's payroll. It includes BYD Electronic, a majority-owned contract manufacturer that reported 165,000 employees of its own at the end of 2025, plus the battery business that supplies other automakers, and in-house chips, motors, energy storage and rail transit operations. Vertical integration is largely what drives the high headcount, in the publication's analysis. ¹

On a raw productivity comparison, Electrek calculates that BYD sold about 4.6 million vehicles in 2025 with 869,600 employees, or 5.3 vehicles per worker, against roughly 12 per worker at Tesla (1,636,129 deliveries with 134,785 people), about 13.5 at Volkswagen Group and roughly 29 at Toyota on 11.3 million group sales including Daihatsu and Hino. These are the publication's own divisions of 2025 sales by year-end workforce, not figures asserted by any of the companies. ¹

Among legacy automakers, Electrek lists Volkswagen Group at 662,942 employees at the end of 2025 (counting its Chinese joint ventures), Toyota at 390,927 as of 31 March 2026, Stellantis at 258,668, Ford at 169,000 and GM at 156,000 for 2025, and Tesla at 134,785 in its latest 10-K. Adding Toyota, GM, Ford and Tesla yields about 851,000 people, roughly 170,000 fewer than BYD's claimed total. ¹

Overseas sales surge against a China-centred workforce

The most striking mismatch in Electrek's figures is geographic: international sales reached 1,342,960 units through September 2026, up 92.7 per cent and about 43 per cent of BYD's total volume, yet only about 60,000 of its 1.02 million workers, roughly six per cent, are based outside China. In the publication's view, BYD is still building nearly everything at home and shipping it out even as factories in Thailand, Brazil and Hungary come online. ¹

Detailing that manufacturing footprint, TopChinaCar's 2026 research report describes full operations at Thailand's Rayong plant since July 2024, Brazil's Camaçari three-factory complex in production with a 50 per cent localisation target for early 2027, and the Hungary Szeged plant, which began trial production in the first quarter of 2026 with series production slated for the fourth quarter after earlier delays. The same report puts BYD's 2025 overseas revenue at 310.7 billion yuan, 38.6 per cent of the group total, with a 19.46 per cent overseas gross margin versus 16.66 per cent domestically. ²

The overseas ambition is still climbing. TopChinaCar's report says chairman Wang Chuanfu announced a raised 2026 overseas target of 1.5 million units, about 43 per cent above the 1.05 million exported in 2025, with some institutions, which the report identifies as including Morgan Stanley, forecasting as much as 1.6 to 1.8 million, and a stated longer-term goal of overseas sales reaching half of volume by 2030. ²

Electrek flags the risk that this model gets tested abroad: tariffs in Europe, Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere are pushing local production, and a factory in Hungary or Brazil will not necessarily produce the same results. The publication argues the number that should most concern legacy automakers is the 120,000 engineers, almost as many people as Tesla employs in total. ¹

The Australian angle: no local factory, but a fast-growing market

BYD's Australian presence sits entirely on the import side of that model. CarExpert reported in June 2026 that BYD vice president Liu Xueliang said local manufacturing was not in the plan yet, telling a Melbourne media event: "maybe our priority will be sales volume, and fulfilling customer needs first, but — BYD is very open, so anything is possible". CarExpert notes the China–Australia free trade agreement since 2015 means Chinese-built vehicles attract no tariffs or import duties here. Liu also flagged more commercial vehicles for Australia, citing skyrocketing diesel prices for commercial operators. ⁴

The tariff contrast is sharpest in Europe. According to TopChinaCar's 2026 report, the EU imposes a 17 per cent countervailing duty on Chinese-built electric vehicles on top of the standard 10 per cent car duty, which the European Commission's own record lists as BYD's definitive rate when it imposed the duties for five years from 30 October 2024. It is against that barrier that BYD's Hungarian plant, cited by TopChinaCar as its European manufacturing pivot, is meant to lower per-vehicle production costs by 20 to 30 per cent. ²³

Local scale has grown quickly on the back of the same vertically integrated production the chairman credits. GoAuto reported that BYD celebrated its 100,000th Australian sale in April 2026, a Brisbane Shark 6 customer, and that BYD committed to shipping an additional 30,000 vehicles to Australia through May and June 2026, with priority delivery access, though not exclusivity, for essential workers such as doctors, nurses, teachers and emergency services staff. BYD Asia Pacific general manager Liu Xueliang told GoAuto the company's ability to rapidly scale production through its vertically integrated supply chain positioned it to respond to heightened demand. Under the arrangement GoAuto describes, BYD Australia chief operating officer Stephen Collins said the process will be supervised by BYD Australia, with eligibility verified through standard employment documentation. ⁶

That trajectory is recent. GoAuto's December 2023 market insight recorded just 10,975 BYD sales in Australia year-to-date at that point, a 1.1 per cent share, against Toyota's 195,959, and noted the company then aimed to overtake Toyota in Australia by the end of the decade. The scale of change from that base to 100,000 cumulative sales within roughly two and a half years illustrates the export-led growth now visible in the global figures. ⁵

Context: the model under domestic pressure

The hiring surge comes against a difficult domestic backdrop. Electrek reports BYD has been stuck in a price war at home and is losing ground to rivals including Geely and Leapmotor, with September 2026 its best month of the year at 463,561 units. The Teardown's company profile records that BYD cut its 2025 sales target from 5.5 million to 4.6 million units in September 2025 amid cooling demand, and that FY2025 net profit fell about 19 per cent to RMB 32.62 billion as gross margin narrowed to 17.74 per cent from 19.44 per cent. ¹³

The broader history matters to Wang's framing. The Teardown's sourced timeline shows BYD founded in Shenzhen in 1995 as a nickel-cadmium battery maker, entering cars by acquiring Xi'an Qinchuan Automobile in 2003, stopping pure-petrol production in April 2022 to focus on BEVs and PHEVs, and reaching its 10 millionth new energy vehicle in November 2024. Electrek's own analysis concludes the 1.02 million figure should not be read as a sign of strength on its own: it is a labour-heavy model that works, in the publication's view, because Chinese factory labour is relatively cheap and plentiful. ¹³