BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu has laid down a marker: his company will be the world’s largest automaker within five years. For context, BYD sold roughly 4.3 million passenger vehicles in 2024. Toyota, the current title holder, moved about 10 million. That’s a gap, but not an insurmountable one for a company whose production has expanded eightfold since 2021.

This isn’t a new ambition for Wang. The goal traces back to at least 2010, when his initial roadmap called for BYD to become China’s top producer by 2015. That specific timeline slipped, but the company now generates over $110 billion in annual revenue and employs a workforce projected to reach approximately 970,000 by 2025.

The numbers behind the ambition

BYD already holds one crown. It surpassed Tesla as the world’s largest electric vehicle maker in 2024, selling around 1.8 million fully electric units. That figure doesn’t include its plug-in hybrids, which push total sales to that 4.3 million number.

Since 2022, BYD has produced zero gasoline-only internal combustion engine vehicles. Every car rolling off its assembly lines runs on some form of new energy technology, whether that’s a pure battery electric drivetrain or a plug-in hybrid system.

What stands between BYD and the top spot

The math is straightforward but unforgiving. BYD needs to roughly double its annual sales to catch Toyota, and it needs to do so while expanding aggressively into markets outside China.

Tariffs are the obvious hurdle. The US has effectively locked Chinese EVs out of the market with steep import duties, and the European Union has imposed its own countervailing tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles. BYD has responded by building factories in Hungary, Brazil, Thailand, and other markets.

Competition from other Chinese automakers also deserves mention. Geely, Chery, and NIO are all pursuing international expansion with varying degrees of aggression.

What this means for investors

BYD’s vertical integration, controlling everything from lithium mining to chip design to final assembly, gives it structural cost advantages that most competitors simply cannot replicate in the near term.

For crypto-adjacent investors, the connection is thin but worth noting. In 2019, a tokenized version of BYD shares (ticker 1211) launched on Ethereum through Currency.com. There have also been isolated instances of USDT being used for vehicle transactions in certain markets. But BYD itself has no meaningful blockchain or digital asset strategy.

Investors watching this space should pay close attention to BYD’s factory buildouts in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America as the real-time scorecard for whether Wang’s five-year vision is on track.