BYD Chairman: Company Expects To Triple EV Sales This Year

The leading Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer, BYD Company, is expecting to nearly triple its electric vehicle sales in China this year, according to the company’s Chairman Wang Chuanfu.

The company is apparently expecting to sell as many as 150,000 electric vehicles (EVs) in China in 2016 — up from around 58,000 in 2015 — according to the comments made by the chairman at a recent briefing in Hong Kong.

BYD Tang

The Chairman also noted that: “The Chinese government has more comprehensive policy support on new-energy cars (all-electrics and plug-in hybrids) than other governments, leading to the industry’s explosive development last year. The rapid growth will remain from 2016 to 2018.”

Bloomberg provides more:

The company surged the most in more than five months in intraday trading in Hong Kong after predicting first-quarter profit may rise more than 50% from a year earlier.

China has stepped up the building of charging infrastructure and rolled out incentives to encourage automakers and consumers to switch to electric vehicles as part of a broader initiative to mitigate the toll that rising car ownership is exacting on the environment. Industrywide EV sales surged more than threefold to 331,000 units last year as the government pushes to reach its target of having five million of the vehicles on its roads by the end of the decade.

The prediction made by the Chairman is quite believable, as BYD essentially tripled its EV sales last year as well (2015 sales as compared to 2014), so a repeat occurrence seems reasonable.

The company’s full-year net income actually rose nearly seven-fold last year as well, so the company is clearly currently in an expansionary phase.

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