BYD's name means nothing, and its early edge came from hand labour
The letters BYD have no meaning. The firm began as Yadi Electronics, named after a road in Shenzhen, and an extra character was added at registration partly to put it earlier in trade-show listings. Only in 2008, arriving at a Detroit motor show, did it adopt the backronym Build Your Dreams.
Wang Chuanfu, then working at a Beijing research institute on non-ferrous metals, saw Japanese makers moving away from nickel-cadmium batteries toward pricier chemistries. With his cousin Lu Xiangyang he moved to Shenzhen, and in February 1995 registered a battery company with 2.5 million yuan of capital. Instead of copying Japan's heavily automated plants, BYD used far more manual labour and built much of its own machinery, cutting unit costs to a fraction of its rivals'.
Cheap, reliable cells won big customers. Sanyo placed an order in 1996, and during the Asian financial crisis Philips, Panasonic and Motorola signed on. By July 2002 BYD made 65 percent of the world's nickel-cadmium batteries, overtaking Sanyo, and by 2012 it supplied more than half of all mobile phone batteries. Success brought lawsuits, including a 2002 patent case from Sanyo and a 2007 trade-secrets suit from Foxconn.
After listing in Hong Kong in 2002, the company bought a small carmaker, the start of what became BYD Auto. In 2008 Berkshire Hathaway, on Charlie Munger's urging, paid about 230 million dollars for nearly a tenth of the company; when it sold the last shares in 2025 the stake had returned roughly 3,890 percent. The car business stalled at 400,000 to 500,000 vehicles a year from 2009 to 2020, and after profits fell to 1.6 billion yuan in 2019, Wang called it the darkest moment, while still spending 8.4 billion on research.
The 2020 Blade battery, a lithium iron phosphate design pitched as safer, helped power a surge in electric car sales. By September 2024 the group employed 900,608 people, making it China's biggest private employer, and it has also built solar panels and a monorail.
Source: BYD Company
