Surpassing Toyota “not a priority” for BYD

SURPASSING Toyota’s sales figures is “not a priority” for BYD according to its local director of public relations Paul Ellis, as the popular Chinese electrified vehicle brand eyes a top three spot in the Australian sales charts.

June this year marked a record month for BYD in Australia, with its 18881 local deliveries placing it second among the top 10 best-selling car makers in the country for the month.

It trailed Toyota – a marque that has topped the Aussie sales charts for over two decades – by just 243 vehicles during the month.

Despite its June sales figures sitting within striking distance of the country’s best-selling brand, surpassing Toyota in the sales charts is not a priority for BYD according to Mr Ellis.

“Passing to Toyota is not a priority for BYD at the moment. In the fullness of time, we hope to be really competitive and be amongst the top brands in Australia,” Mr Ellis said at the Australian launch of the BYD Seal 6.

“We said that by the end of this year we'd like to cement our position in the top three brands in Australia. Now beyond that, where it lands, we don't know. But setting ourselves a target of beating a competitor, that’s not how we approach our business.”

Mr Ellis attributed BYD’s June success to its fulfilment of orders taken in the wake of the Iran War and the resulting fuel price hikes.

“I'm gonna say (June was not a big month for sales). June was a big month for deliveries. So there's a difference. We delivered a lot of cars in June, and they were from orders that peaked when the fuel prices went up, when we had the skyrocketing fuel prices, with what was happening in the Middle East and cost of living pressures with interest rates and with low market growth.”

“It was just sort of a pivot point for many consumers to say, ‘how can I bring down my expenses?’ And they were bringing forward maybe their purchasing decisions with new energy vehicles.”

“So we had a massive spike in orders and we were very fortunate to be able to negotiate with the factory to get production, extra production, to meet those orders and deliver those cars within quite a short period. And it culminated in a commitment to deliver 30,000 vehicles in quarter two alone.”

This wave of deliveries had BYD dealers and stakeholders “working overtime” according to Mr Ellis.

“What we saw in June was all that planning coming together and our dealers and all our stakeholders working overtime in June to deliver as many cars as we could. So we had dealers delivering cars in evenings to customers, we had dealers delivering cars on weekends to customers, we had food vans on site to help our customers come and get the cars when it suited them, not just during regular business hours. So June was the outcome of an effort.”

With this year’s sudden buyer shift towards electrified vehicles along with its timing as the end of the financial year, June’s delivery numbers came under an anomalous set of circumstances that BYD doesn’t expect repeat regularly according to Mr Ellis.

“...we can't see a month like that being a normal month going forward. And you've also got to remember that seasonally, June is always the biggest month. It's the end of the financial year.”

“So you look at that and you look at what we were able to achieve with the extra production that we got from the factory and the commitment that we made to consumers that we would deliver cars as quickly as we could and we put a June 30 date on that to get those cars to customers.

“It was basically an outcome. It wasn't something we chased, it was just an outcome of everything that we did in the preceding months.”

BYD’s Australia sales figures in June were led by the Sealion 7 mid-size battery electric SUV, which ranked as the fourth best-selling model in Australia for the month with 4730 examples sold.

Its sales were some 445 vehicles adrift of the third-placed Toyota HiLux, but 615 clear of the fifth-placed Toyota RAV4.

The BYD Shark 6 plug-in hybrid ute also placed among the top 10, with its 3398 sales putting it in sixth.

Meanwhile, the Tesla Model Y led the sales charts with 8072 local deliveries.