BEIJING, March 28 — Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD said on Friday its annual net profit in 2025 fell 19 per cent from a year earlier as it battled weak spending and fierce competition at home while looking to expand overseas.

BYD’s net profit attributable to shareholders last year was 32.6 billion yuan (US$4.7 billion; RM290.94 billion), down from 40.3 billion yuan (RM23.39 billion) in 2024, the company said in a filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

BYD – which uses the English slogan “Build Your Dreams” – has emerged in recent years as the clear leader in China’s highly competitive EV market, the world’s largest.

China’s EV industry is world-leading but a cutthroat domestic market has weighed on profitability, with BYD and other carmakers turning to overseas markets in response.

Scrutiny of the EV market is also growing, with a top industry group rebuking Chinese automakers last May for fuelling a price war, a week after BYD announced sweeping trade-in discounts.

“Competition in the NEV industry has reached a fever pitch, and is undergoing a brutal ‘knockout stage’,” BYD’s chairman Wang Chuanfu said in a statement, using an acronym for new energy vehicles.

BYD recorded 804 billion yuan (RM466.78 billion) in revenue last year, up a modest 3.5 per cent compared to 2024.

Its annual revenue surpassed that of its American rival Tesla in 2024 and crossed the symbolic US$100 billion (RM401.3 billion) mark, at 777 billion yuan.

However, profit in the third quarter of 2025 slumped by 33 per cent year-on-year, its second consecutive quarterly decline.

The recent slowdown comes after a period of sustained, intense growth, and BYD’s profit in the first quarter of 2025 was a record for the company in that reporting period.

BYD’s overseas ambitions appear to be gathering pace, with its vehicles now operating in “119 countries and regions worldwide”, according to Friday’s filing.

It sold more than 13,000 units in European Union countries in September, a year-on-year increase of 272.1 per cent, according to a report by the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. — AFP