There is a Chinese company that has just produced its seventeenth millionth new energy car. Not the seventeenth, mind you: the seventeenth millionth. The number has the same effect as when, as a child, someone told you «a billion stars» and you stayed looking at the sky with the vague impression that the sky itself had become a little bigger.
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Its name is BYD. This year it reached the ninety-first place in the Fortune Global 500, the ranking of companies that really matter, those that if they sneeze the Dow Jones catches a cold. Fifth consecutive year among the top one hundred.
The numbers of growth
In 2025 it generated revenue of eight hundred and four billion yuan (one hundred and eleven billion dollars), sold four million six hundred thousand electric or hybrid vehicles, and set aside a net profit of over thirty-two billion. In the first six months of 2026 it has already delivered another one million eight hundred thousand. And that’s not enough. Outside China, for the first time, it exceeded one million units in a year, with a growth of one hundred and forty-five percent. One hundred and twenty-one countries and regions. In other words: if there is a place where someone still drives something that goes “vroom vroom,” they will get there sooner or later.
The environmental revolution
Reading the official statements gives the impression of witnessing a revolution told with the tone of a weather report. Investments in research and development: sixty-three billion yuan in 2025 alone, seventeen percent more than the previous year. Historical total: more than two hundred and fifty billion. Second-generation “Blade” batteries, lightning-fast charging, driver assistance systems that probably already know where you want to go better than you do. And then the figure that closes the ethical circle: their vehicles and energy solutions would have avoided one hundred and forty-nine billion kilograms of carbon dioxide, equivalent to two billion four hundred and eighty million trees. Two and a half billion trees. One imagines a forest covering entire continents, but it is just a calculation, an abstraction as elegant as the Fortune ranking.
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Very young company
We are talking about a company born in 1995 making rechargeable batteries that today stops producing fossil fuel engines, conquers markets, plants virtual flags on six continents and declares it wants to “leverage technological innovations for a better life.” The better life, apparently, goes through numbers that no longer fit in the head of an average European, used to debating whether the car bonus arrives or not and whether Euro 6 diesel is still decent.
It is a somewhat tired observation, from someone who has seen too many industrial revolutions told as fairy tales and too many fairy tales turn into consolidated financial statements. BYD rises, sells, invests, reduces emissions, plants virtual trees and comfortably settles in the ninety-first place of the ranking that measures the real power of the planet. Many, on the other side of the world, we continue to call it “Chinese car” with that slight inflection of suspicion we once used for Japanese or Korean products, before they became indispensable. Then we all know how it ended.
