For a hundred years, the global car industry belonged to three regions. Germany made the engineering. Japan made the efficiency. America made the culture. It was a comfortable arrangement, and nobody expected it to change fast.
Then BYD happened.
In roughly three years, a company from Shenzhen — one that most Western consumers had never heard of — turned the global automotive order into something resembling a battlefield. The numbers are almost hard to believe. Mercedes profits down 28%. Porsche, a brand so premium it seemed untouchable, lost 92% of its profits in a single year. Volkswagen announced it was cutting 50,000 jobs. Stellantis posted a $26 billion loss — the worst in its history. And behind almost every one of these blows, the same name kept appearing.
BYD. Build Your Dreams.
The Playbook That Nobody Saw Coming
To understand how BYD pulled this off, you have to go back to 2003. That’s when founder Wang Chuanfu made a decision that seemed strange at the time: instead of buying components from suppliers like every other automaker, he would make everything himself. Batteries, chips, electric motors, semiconductors — the entire supply chain, under one roof.
It was expensive and complicated to build. But when it worked, it became almost impossible to compete with.
When global supply chains collapsed during the pandemic and rivals were shutting assembly lines for want of chips or battery cells, BYD barely paused. It controlled its own supply. It could cut costs at every level simultaneously — and it did, passing those savings straight to consumers in the form of prices that Western manufacturers simply couldn’t match.
The second smart move was the technology bet. While Tesla was going all-in on pure electric vehicles and betting that charging infrastructure would follow, BYD focused heavily on plug-in hybrids — cars that can run on electricity for daily city driving but switch to petrol when needed. For millions of Chinese consumers living outside major cities, where charging points are still scarce, this wasn’t a compromise. It was the sensible choice. BYD read that market reality earlier and more accurately than almost anyone else.
The third piece was the Blade Battery. Developed entirely in-house, it uses lithium iron phosphate chemistry arranged in a flat, blade-like structure that slots into the car’s chassis. The result is a battery that’s safer than conventional lithium-ion packs, cheaper to produce, and lasts longer. It became BYD’s signature technology — and a genuine competitive advantage.
On the back of all this, BYD expanded fast. In Thailand, it captured 40% of the EV market. In Brazil, 72%. In Europe, it reached 11% of EV sales. The one major market where it couldn’t break through was the United States — blocked on national security grounds by an administration that understood exactly what kind of competitor it was dealing with.
It’s Not a Company. It’s a Weapon.
Here’s where the story gets more complicated.
The comfortable version of BYD’s rise is a classic entrepreneurship story: scrappy battery maker becomes global giant through superior engineering and relentless execution. That version isn’t entirely wrong. But it leaves out something important.
BYD’s growth didn’t happen in a free market. It happened inside the scaffolding of China’s Made in China 2025 industrial strategy — a state-directed plan to achieve global dominance in key sectors, with electric vehicles at the top of the list. Under this plan, BYD received billions in subsidies. It got land grants at negligible cost. It accessed state-backed loans at interest rates no private lender would offer. It benefited from China’s systematic control over rare earth minerals and lithium supplies that the rest of the world competes to secure.
The argument made in the Statrys documentary is blunt: BYD is not simply a company competing in a market. It is a state-sponsored instrument designed to dominate that market — to undercut rivals with pricing that no unsubsidised manufacturer can match until the competition either exits or collapses, and then hold that position permanently.
This is what economists call predatory pricing. Sell below cost to drive out competitors. Once they’re gone, the market is yours.
The European Union took this seriously enough to launch a formal anti-subsidy investigation in 2024, resulting in additional tariffs on Chinese-made EVs. The US had already acted. But across Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa — where regulatory scrutiny is lower and BYD’s price advantage is most decisive — the expansion continues largely unchecked.
The Numbers That Should Make You Nervous
If the subsidy argument is the ideological critique of BYD, there’s also a financial critique that’s arguably more urgent — and less discussed.
Beneath the headline sales figures, some analysts who’ve studied BYD’s filings closely have flagged a troubling pattern. BYD extends very long payment terms to its suppliers, effectively using them as a source of short-term credit. This inflates its apparent cash position while building up obligations that don’t always show up clearly on the balance sheet. Estimates of this hidden debt run into the hundreds of billions of yuan.
The Evergrande comparison isn’t just rhetoric. It reflects a pattern: Chinese companies, sometimes with state encouragement, grow explosively on leverage that remains invisible until it suddenly isn’t. Evergrande was a property company. BYD is an automaker. But the underlying dynamic — growth funded by obligations that don’t appear in the headline numbers — looks uncomfortably similar.
The sales figures themselves have been questioned. Reports from within China’s automotive distribution networks describe a practice of registering vehicles as sold — sometimes to shell entities or internal structures — before any actual retail buyer exists. These “zero-kilometre second-hand cars” get counted as new sales, inflating the headline number. BYD’s claimed 4.25 million units sold in 2025 has been met with meaningful scepticism from independent analysts whose data doesn’t fully reconcile with the company’s own reporting.
Quality has also become a visible problem. BYD issued mass recalls covering tens of thousands of vehicles across 2024 and 2025. For a brand still building its reputation in export markets, recalls at scale are not just expensive — they’re damaging at exactly the moment when first impressions are being formed.
And then the financial results themselves started turning. Profit fell 19% in 2025. Vehicle sales dropped 41%. For a company whose valuation was built on the assumption of perpetual hypergrowth, these aren’t minor blips. They’re the kind of numbers that demand a fundamental reassessment of the story.
What Comes Next
The Evergrande comparison is worth sitting with for a moment. China’s property market didn’t collapse because Evergrande was simply a badly run business. It collapsed because an entire ecosystem of state support, implicit guarantees, and distorted incentives allowed a company to grow far beyond what real demand could sustain. When the gap between appearance and reality finally closed, it closed fast and hard.
The question the documentary poses is whether BYD is following the same arc in a different industry.
That might or might not prove correct. BYD does make genuinely good cars. The Blade Battery is a real technological achievement. Wang Chuanfu’s decision to vertically integrate was, by any measure, visionary. These things are true — they exist alongside the subsidies and the accounting questions, not in contradiction to them.
But the broader lesson may matter more than BYD’s specific fate. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan is already being drafted. The EV sector was the chosen weapon for this cycle. The next cycle will have a new target industry — and the playbook will be the same: state capital, vertical integration, predatory pricing, and a long-term willingness to absorb losses that no purely private competitor can match.
For Western governments, the lesson is that conventional trade rules were written for conventional competition — not for situations where one of the competitors is, in a meaningful sense, a country. For investors, it’s a reminder that headline growth numbers in this environment require a level of scrutiny that quarterly earnings calls don’t encourage. And for consumers in markets currently enjoying BYD’s low prices, the question worth asking is what those prices look like once the competition has been cleared from the field.
The honest answer to the documentary’s central question is probably: both things are true simultaneously. BYD is a genuine industrial achievement. And it may also be the most elaborate state-backed market disruption ever deployed at global scale. The uncomfortable part is that those two things aren’t mutually exclusive — which is precisely what makes BYD so hard to assess, and so important to understand.
