BYD now has more than 1.02 million employees, Chairman and President Wang Chuanfu said on Wednesday, about 150,000 more than the company reported at the end of 2025.
About 960,000 work in China and about 60,000 overseas, and the company has about 120,000 research and development (R&D) engineers working on batteries, motors, electronic controls and semiconductors, Wang said in his acceptance speech for the Rao Bin Award.
The award, presented at the China Society of Automotive Engineers’ annual congress, is described by the industry as the highest honor in China’s auto sector.
The new figure marks a sharp reversal from last year. BYD reported 869,622 employees worldwide at the end of 2025 in its 2025 sustainability report.
That was down from about 969,000 a year earlier, a drop of nearly 100,000, mostly frontline production workers.
Wang’s figure implies the company has added at least 150,000 people in the first ten months of 2026, an increase of about 17%. BYD has not broken down where the new hires went.
Some of the growth has been visible. BYD’s manufacturing base in Xi’an posted more than 8,000 open positions in September as it sought thousands of production workers after retooling its lines, with bonuses of up to 6,000 yuan ($900), Yicai reported at the time.
For comparison, Ford, which reported results on Wednesday, said in its earnings release that it employs about 170,000 people, about one-sixth of BYD’s workforce.
Engineers and the Overseas Gap
The 120,000 engineer figure is broadly in line with what BYD has disclosed before. Its 2025 sustainability report put research and development staff at more than 120,000, and Sina Finance reported that the annual report showed about 127,700 technical staff at the end of 2025, up 4,741 from a year earlier.
The overseas workforce is small relative to BYD’s foreign sales. The 60,000 staff abroad represent about 6% of the total, while exports made up 39.0% of BYD’s September sales, when it shipped 180,700 vehicles outside China.
BYD has raised its 2026 overseas sales target to 1.9 million to 2.0 million vehicles, and management has said it aims for more than 2.5 million in 2027.
Its foreign manufacturing has run into problems. Its plant in Thailand has slowed production by a third, its factory in Hungary has faced scrutiny from the local government, and Brazil added BYD to its register of employers found using labor analogous to slavery over conditions at a construction site for its factory.
BYD wants three European car plants and a battery factory, an adviser has said.
What Wang Said
The China Society of Automotive Engineers organizes the award, which was established in 2013 on the centenary of the birth of Rao Bin, often described as the father of China’s auto industry, according to China News Service.
“I want to solve a proof problem, to prove that Chinese new energy can do it, that Chinese cars can do it,” Wang said in his speech, according to China News Service.
BYD’s development is “a microcosm of China’s auto industry going from following to leading,” Wang said, according to Sina Auto.
The award citation described Wang as a strategist who “has always set strategy by technology” since he began working on electric vehicles in 1996, and said he “leads 120,000 R&D engineers,” according to China News Service.
It noted that BYD’s sales rose tenfold in five years, from 400,000 to 4.6 million vehicles, and that its products are sold in more than 120 countries and regions.
