BYD: Meaty, beaty, big and bouncy
It’s been a welcome return to form for the world’s largest EV manufacturer, with a rise in profits for the first time in five quarters despite intense competition in its domestic market. BYD highlighted the complex and challenging international environment with its increased geopolitical risks, but this didn’t stop it from exporting at pace, with overseas revenue making up more than half of the total for the first time as exports were up 68% to 792,000 vehicles in the first six months of the year.
The speed at which BYD operates is evident in the rollout of its ultra-fast flash charging network in China, which has doubled in size to 10,000 chargers in the past five months, with the aim to double again to 20,000 by the end of the year. That will mean installing 80 of these 1.5MW chargers a day for the rest of the year, with the ability to charge one of BYD’s latest vehicles with its Blade 2.0 battery from 10% to 97% in about nine minutes.
BYD is best known for offering great value at the reasonably priced end of the market, but if you really want to impress the neighbours you might want to take a peep at its premium brand, Denza, and its quite frankly lunatic brand, Yangwang. The Yangwang U9 Xtreme can deploy its 2,978bhp to hit a top speed of a tidy 496.22km/h, or alternatively, to confirm that this is a marble-free environment, its individually controlled wheels can make it dance by bouncing each corner up and down in time to music.
Shein: Not so shiny now
Shein’s glory days were back in the pandemic, when everybody was stuck at home with nothing better to do than to scour its app for a $3 frock. At the time, few seemed overly concerned about the level of wages paid down at the murkier end of its supply chain, or even, according to some allegations that the company denies, whether wages were being paid at all. In 2022 the company raised money at a valuation of around $100bn, a very long way from the $27bn expected at its forthcoming listing in Hong Kong.
Net profit topped out at $3.4bn in 2024 before falling to $2bn last year and a net loss of $99m in the first quarter of this year. The business has been clobbered by the closure last year of a loophole in the US and the EU known as the de minimis rule, which allowed packages worth less than $800 to be imported free of duties. That, and the higher tariffs on Chinese goods set by the Trump administration, have seen Shein’s US business drop from about 30% of its total revenues in 2023 to around 23% this year.
There has also been considerably increased competition as rivals sought to match Shein’s success, with PDD setting up Temu in 2022, Amazon launching Haul in 2024 and TikTok’s Shop now overtaking Shein in sales in the US. Its Hong Kong IPO comes after failed attempts to list in New York and London, which collapsed over supply chain issues and a lack of Chinese regulatory approval respectively, and it’s been a period that its early investors won’t have enjoyed.
