Right now, BYD stock is experiencing a certain level of stillness. On May 8, shares in Shenzhen closed at 100.02 yuan, down just 0.5 percent. In Hong Kong, H-shares also barely moved, settling at 99.75 HKD. This level of flatness is almost unsettling for a company that once surpassed 116 yuan and once again made Warren Buffett seem like a genius. It’s unclear exactly what investors are waiting for.
It was not helped by the figures from late April. Profit for the first quarter fell 55.4% to 4.09 billion RMB, a figure that most analysts were reluctant to acknowledge. Year over year, revenue decreased by almost 12%. Even though month-over-month figures showed a slight increase, April vehicle sales came in at 321,123 NEV units, marking the eighth consecutive month of annual declines. As this develops, it appears that BYD is no longer benefiting from the domestic Chinese EV market. Competition has become more intense, pricing wars have become messier, and the company’s once-uncontested home-field dominance has subtly diminished.
However, a different narrative is emerging somewhere outside of that image. In April, overseas shipments reached a record 135,000 units, up about 70% from the previous year. It’s not a rounding error. BYD is close to the core of JPMorgan’s recent significant upward revision of its forecast for the market share of Chinese OEMs in Western Europe, which was increased to 20% by 2028. You can now see a BYD Atto or a Seal in traffic in London, Berlin, and Madrid’s suburbs, though the badge is still unfamiliar enough that drivers sometimes take a second look. In the long run, that type of gradual saturation usually matters more than any one quarter’s earnings announcement.
The analyst community splits in interesting ways at this point. Goldman Sachs calls Q1 the trough and has a buy rating with a target of 134 HKD. At 142 HKD, Citigroup is even more optimistic. Nomura’s price is 127 HKD. BNP Paribas, on the other hand, has an Underperform rating and a target of 87 HKD, which would feel almost punitive if it were reached. The consensus estimate for Simply Wall St. is approximately 124 HKD, with a high estimate of 147 and a low estimate of 86.99. It’s difficult to ignore how abnormally large that spread is. Bulls are searching overseas. Bears are examining margins.
The cultural context is also important. There have been a lot of “next BYD” comparisons since Xiaomi quietly entered the battery industry by registering a new company called Xiaomi Jingxu Technology Co., Ltd. It might be too soon. Findreams, BYD’s battery division, is one of the most significant in the world thanks to decades of vertical integration. Although Xiaomi has software and scale, battery factories take time to build. However, the framing alone reveals something about the way investors are beginning to think: BYD’s moat is being examined, replicated, and tested in real time.
There’s a sense that BYD is expected to be both an aggressive international exporter still in its early stages and a mature domestic incumbent absorbing margin pain. The stock may be stalling close to 100 because those stories don’t price cleanly together. More than 100,000 pre-sale orders were placed for the flagship Datang SUV. There were 5,924 flash-charging stations in China. Additionally, Tesla’s UK registrations lagged behind BYD’s, despite a 62% increase in April. There is a footprint. How long the market will wait is still an open question.
