Beijing
The world’s largest electric vehicle maker is locked out of its biggest potential overseas market.
But BYD – the Chinese EV behemoth – says barriers restricting it and other Chinese carmakers from American consumers won’t stop it from maintaining that top spot in an industry transforming how people drive.
“Without the US market, BYD still will be the leading position,” Stella Li, the company’s executive vice president, told CNN during an interview on the sidelines of the Beijing auto show earlier this week.
Washington has effectively barred Chinese carmakers from importing to the US market, citing concerns around national security and the need to protect American carmakers from rivals that have benefited from the Chinese government’s long-term support for its EV sector.
Those US restrictions are expected to be in the spotlight next month when Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosts President Donald Trump in Beijing.
BYD’s Li said she hopes the highly anticipated summit could lead to change. “You start a dialogue, then you see the business opportunity, then you should open up, because this is win-win,” she said.
Even still, Li added that the vehicle maker has “no future plan” as yet for its cars to enter the US market.
For now, the company is expanding seemingly everywhere else. It’s understood to have set its sights on selling at least 1.5 million vehicles overseas this year, about half a million more than last year.
That scale-up is imperative for the automaker, which – despite taking the superlative No.1-EV-maker title from Tesla last year – is seeing its profits shrink amid a knock-down, drag-out fight with rivals for market share within China.
How the company drives forward its overseas growth could have outsize international impact. Automakers around the globe and their employees fear being overwhelmed by BYD’s prolific industrial capacity and competitive pricing. Consumer access to more affordable EVs could help accelerate the worldwide transition from fossil fuels – and offer welcome alternatives amid a global oil shock due to the Iran war.
Already, Li sees a boon for BYD in the current oil crisis that’s driven up prices at the gas pump.
“It’s like a wake-up call for the people who never touch EV,” she said, adding BYD has already seen a surge of demand in markets such as Australia and Indonesia.
That interest comes at a critical time for BYD.
A battery manufacturer turned carmaker in the early 2000s, the company established an early lead over domestic rivals by cracking the code on making EV batteries cheaply.
BYD has consolidated its advantage by automating production and controlling its supply chain, including software and hardware, with meticulous detail.
The publicly traded company boasts a commanding lead of nearly 20% of China’s EV and hybrid market, industry data shows. And its global rise has launched it to a level of world renown never before achieved by a Chinese automaker.
But rougher times are here.
In 2025, the company recorded its first annual profit drop in four years down by 19%, and its net profit more than halved year on year in the first quarter of 2026.
Demand for EVs in China is slowing after the government trimmed consumer subsidies and perks, and there’s no end in sight to a brutal price war as a crowded field of EV rivals jostle to outperform and undercut one another.
“There’s still no clear-cut winner. BYD, right? They were flying up until 2024 – and then 2025, so far this year, they’ve had a lot of pressure,” said industry analyst Lei Xing, pointing to the intense one-upmanship in the market when it comes to rolling out products and features.
BYD stumbled from its spot as China’s largest automaker overall at the start of this year, with rival Geely overtaking it in domestic car sales by unit in the first quarter, industry data shows. In an interview with CNN on Saturday, Geely senior vice president Victor Yang said he was “quite confident” of the company keeping its momentum with the “right products in the pipeline” and consumer trust.
When asked about BYD’s strategy to handle domestic competition in its home market, Li’s response made the strategy clear: “Not only the Chinese market – the global market, is our target.”
Li, the company’s most visible face internationally, has been driving BYD’s global push for decades.
She launched the company’s first overseas outpost in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in the late 1990s and first North America headquarters in Chicago in 2000, both before the company started making cars. She was also running the BYD business in the Americas when the company in 2013 opened its electric bus facility in Lancaster, California.
Li outlined for CNN a global strategy staked on a rapid build-out of charging stations, batteries that get full faster than a gas tank can fuel, and design that localizes BYD cars for different markets.
It’s “not enough,” to be global, she said. “We are now turning BYD toward each country to become a more local brand.”
She described the response from European car dealers to the company’s Denza Z9 GT, a sleek luxury sports car being displayed in droptop convertible form at the auto show this week: “They say ‘Wow, now finally, we trust a Chinese company can do luxury cars.’”
In Europe, registrations of new BYD cars grew more than 150% year on year for the first quarter to more than 73,000 units, shy of Tesla by around 5,000, industry data shows. The brand’s forthcoming passenger-car manufacturing plant in Hungary is positioned to avoid European Union tariffs on Chinese-made vehicles.
BYD also opened a production hub in Thailand in 2024 and inaugurated a sprawling Brazilian factory last year on a site previously occupied by American automaker Ford. That project was marred by a labor investigation, which BYD and its contractors settled late last year. The company plans to open another plant in Indonesia.
But as BYD and other Chinese EV makers scramble to grab market shares abroad, it’s not just about exporting the cars or investing in local production. It’s also a race to build out the charging infrastructure.
When it comes to competition, Li says BYD’s advantage hangs on the rollout of its so-called flash charging stations. Some 6,000 its these stations will be built overseas within 12 months, she said, allowing cars with the tech to charge from 20% to 97% in 12 minutes, even in subzero temperatures.
That will be a “big game changer” for BYD, Li said.
Another one, Li added, is continuing to invest in the hardware and software to power rapidly advancing self-driving technologies – a feature carmakers worldwide are racing to master.
And the company is eyeing those investments with a clear aim: to “make us more powerful in the future, when the AI is more mature,” Li said.
