BYD Needs a Near-Perfect Two Months to Match 2025 After a Record October

BYD sold 490,168 cars in October, up 11% and the best month of the year for the Shenzhen-based electric vehicle maker. In total, BYD sold 305,743 battery-electric vehicles, a 37% increase from last year — the first time ever that monthly BEV sales topped 300,000, and the third consecutive month of all-time high BEV sales.

Through October, BYD has sold 3,621,744 cars. Monthly sales were underwater from January to April, and the record October narrowed the year-to-date decline to just over 2%. The recovery has been driven by strong exports, with BYD reporting higher sales for a sixth month in a row.

The arithmetic for the rest of the year is brutal. To match 2025’s total sales of 4,602,436 vehicles, BYD would need to sell 980,692 units by the end of this year — an average of 490,340 EVs per month in November and December. That is a tough but not impossible proposition: last year BYD sold 480,186 EVs in November and 420,398 in December, and car sales in China tend to spike at the end of the year.

The profit picture is more mixed. BYD’s third-quarter profit jumped 28%, but it still missed analyst estimates, and nine-month profit slipped — volume is holding, but profit is not. The next data points come from rivals: Nio and XPeng report earnings on November 11 and November 24 respectively.