Tesla’s biggest Chinese rival is feeling the heat in China’s car wars

• China’s top automaker BYD posted its first sales drop in over 18 months.
• BYD sold 396,270 cars in September, a 5.5% decline from a year earlier.
• BYD said in August that its “short-term profitability” was being weighed down by discounting.

Tesla’s biggest rival in China, BYD, saw its sales slip for the first time in over 18 months amid China’s bruising EV price wars.

The Chinese automaker said in an exchange filing on Wednesday that it sold 396,270 cars in September, a 5.5% decline from the 419,426 cars it sold a year earlier.

The last time BYD saw a sales drop was in February 2024. That month, BYD sold 122,311 cars, a nearly 37% drop from the 193,655 cars it sold in February 2023.

BYD did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

China’s EV market has been caught in the throes of a brutal price war. Some 100 brands, including Elon Musk’s EV company Tesla, have been locked in an intense competition for a slice of the world’s largest auto market.

In April 2024, Tesla announced that it was slashing the prices of its Model 3, S, X, and Y by 14,000 yuan, or about $1,930 each. Musk said at the time that Tesla’s “prices must change frequently to match production with demand.”

“Other cars change prices constantly and often by wide margins via dealer markups and manufacturer/dealer incentives,” he wrote in an X post on April 21, 2024.

However, price cuts haven’t helped Tesla ward off its Chinese rivals. The company’s annual sales declined for the first time in over a decade after it delivered 1.79 million vehicles in 2024, a 1% drop from the 1.81 million vehicles it delivered in 2023.

In December, Xpeng founder and CEO He Xiaopeng said in an internal letter that the automotive industry will face an “elimination round” from 2025 to 2027.

Earlier, He said in an interview with Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times published in November that most Chinese automakers won’t survive the next decade.

“I personally think that there will only be seven major car companies that will exist in the coming 10 years,” He said, though he did not give the names of the seven companies.

BYD said in its earnings report in August that its “short-term profitability” had been pulled down by “industry malpractices” such as “excessive marketing” and discounting. The company’s net profits in the second quarter of 2025 had fallen 30% from a year earlier.

BYD’s shares are up nearly 27% year to date.

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