BYD, China’s leading electric vehicle maker, is set to break its annual overseas sales target with a full-year volume expected to be close to two million units, with an ambitious 2.5 million units planned for 2027.

The Shenzhen-based automaker is on course to achieve monthly overseas shipments of 180,000–200,000 cars in the second half of the year, having sold nearly 800,000 vehicles in the year to June, management said in a post-earnings briefing on September 7, according to multiple analysts who attended.

The revised full-year sales guidance is roughly 33% higher than the previous target of 1.5 million announced in June by Wang Chuanfu, the company’s founder and chairman, and 25% higher than an updated target in an interim report published last month.

“Management noted that shipping capacity constrained overseas sales this year and that volumes could otherwise have been higher,” Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a research report on Monday, adding that BYD will count on continued market share gains, a larger dedicated carrier fleet and a broader localized production footprint to achieve 2.5 million sales overseas next year.

The automaker has benefited from rising global demand for EVs after fighting in the Middle East sparked an ongoing energy crisis.

“Brazil… Europe, Indonesia and Australia are strong,” Citi analysts wrote in a research note on September 7, adding that there is still “ample share headroom” across different countries and regions.

“Overseas growth momentum will continue to be unleashed, which remains an important pillar of the group’s sales,” BYD said in its interim report.

Buoyant overseas sales have offered BYD a precious respite as the company is battling weak consumer sentiment and brutal competition at home.

The company ended a four-quarter streak of profit declines with a 29.6% jump in net income for the April-June period. Management told analysts that the group generated RMB 20,000 (USD 2,980) per vehicle sold outside China in the first half and expected profitability to remain much the same in the near term.

“The benefits of volume growth are offset by continued investment in sales-network expansion and the ramp-up of new overseas capacity,” Deutsche Bank said.

BYD expects that it will take one to two years for factories in countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, and Hungary to be as cost-efficient as the currently dominant export model, according to Citi.

Overseas profitability is much better than analysts’ projections of less than RMB 3,000 (USD 447) in profit per car sold in the domestic market.

The company is now betting on ultrafast charging and assisted driving technologies to help it stand out from the cutthroat competition at home.

“Average selling prices, premium [product] mix and profitability all improved in the second quarter, as BYD exited the price war through technology rather than price cuts,” said Citi analysts citing BYD management.

BYD aims to recover domestic market share to around 25%, the analysts were told without being given a specific timeline. In the first seven months of the year, BYD’s market share shrank to 21.4%, down 7.8 percentage points from a year earlier, according to data from Automobility, a Shanghai-based consultancy.

Spurred by rapid developments in artificial intelligence, the EV giant has also embarked on a campaign to explore new revenue streams from robotics and energy storage batteries.

“The management believes [the] robot is a strategic opportunity while the mass commercialization, especially replacing workers on production lines will likely take time,” Citi said.

Stella Li, an executive vice president at BYD, told staff in a recent internal meeting that there would be three robots in every household in the future, according to an informed source.

Last month, BYD inked a partnership on data collection with PaXini, a Chinese humanoid robot company, and is considering releasing its own humanoid robot as soon as the third quarter.

The company told analysts that it is particularly bullish on demand for energy storage systems from AI data centers.

Earlier this year, Li also indicated in a corporate marketing video that BYD had sold out all its energy storage production capacity for 2026 and the following year.

“Many investors probably haven’t fully recognized our capability in energy storage,” Li said.

This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.

Note: RMB figures are converted to USD at rates of RMB 6.72 = USD 1 based on estimates as of September 14, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are approximate and, where appropriate, rounded for ease of reference. They may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.