BYD now has 1.02 million workers, more than Toyota, GM, Ford, and Tesla combined

BYD now has more than 1.02 million employees, according to chairman Wang Chuanfu. That’s more people than Toyota, GM, Ford, and Tesla employ combined.

And it’s a big jump from the start of the year. BYD reported about 869,600 employees at the end of 2025, which means the Chinese automaker has added roughly 150,000 people in 10 months while its vehicle sales are down.

Roughly 960,000 of BYD’s people work in China and about 60,000 work abroad. Up to 120,000 of them are R&D engineers, according to Wang, who shared the figures on stage Wednesday at the China Society of Automotive Engineers’ (CSAE) 33rd annual conference. Their work covers battery cells, motors, electronic controls, and semiconductors.

Wang credits vertical integration for that scale. In his telling, keeping batteries, chips, and motors in-house is what took BYD from a battery maker founded in 1994 to the world’s top-selling new energy vehicle brand several years running. He called the company’s rise a microcosm of China’s auto industry going from follower to leader.

BYD’s headcount keeps swinging

BYD’s workforce has been all over the place in the last few years.

The company had about 570,100 employees at the end of 2022 and 703,500 at the end of 2023. Then it went on a hiring spree. We reported in September 2024 that BYD had passed 900,000 employees and claimed the largest R&D workforce of any automaker, with over 110,000 engineers. It ended 2024 with 968,900 people.

Then came the first big cut. BYD’s 2025 annual report showed roughly 869,600 employees at year-end, a drop of about 99,000, mostly in frontline production jobs.

Now it’s back over a million. Data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence put BYD at 911,900 employees at the end of June, so the company added more than 100,000 people in about four months.

How BYD compares to other automakers

The gap with legacy automakers is massive. Volkswagen Group, which counts its Chinese joint ventures, reported 662,942 employees at the end of 2025. Toyota had 390,927 as of March 31, 2026, and Stellantis had 258,668 at the end of last year.

In the US, Ford ended 2025 with 169,000 employees and GM with 156,000. Tesla reported a worldwide headcount of 134,785 in its latest 10-K.

Add up Toyota, GM, Ford, and Tesla and you get about 851,000 people. BYD has roughly 170,000 more than that.

But headcount isn’t output. If you divide 2025 global vehicle sales by year-end workforce, BYD comes out far behind:

BYD sold about 4.6 million vehicles last year with 869,600 employees, or 5.3 vehicles per worker. Tesla delivered 1,636,129 vehicles with 134,785 people, about 12 per worker, and Volkswagen Group was at about 13.5. Toyota, with 11.3 million group sales including Daihatsu and Hino, got roughly 29 vehicles out of each employee.

There’s a catch, and it’s a big one. BYD’s headcount isn’t only a car company’s headcount. It includes BYD Electronic, its majority-owned contract manufacturer that assembles devices for other brands and reported 165,000 employees of its own at the end of 2025. It also covers BYD’s battery business, which supplies other automakers, plus its in-house chips, motors, energy storage, and rail transit operations.

In short, BYD’s vertical integration largely drives its high headcount.

Hiring while sales slip

BYD sold 3,131,576 vehicles in the first nine months of 2026, down 3.9% year-over-year. September was its best month of the year at 463,561 units, but the company has been stuck in a brutal price war at home and is losing ground to rivals like Geely and Leapmotor. Its first-half revenue (344.8 billion yuan) and net profit (12.3 billion yuan) were both down year-over-year.

All of the growth is overseas. BYD’s international sales hit 1,342,960 units through September, up 92.7%, and they now make up about 43% of its total volume. That’s on top of BYD beating Tesla on pure EV deliveries again in Q2.

Yet only 60,000 of its 1.02 million workers are based outside China. That’s about 6%. So BYD is still building nearly everything at home and shipping it out, even as its factories in Thailand, Brazil, and Hungary come online.

Electrek’s Take

The 1.02 million number makes for a great headline, but we wouldn’t read it as a sign of strength on its own.

BYD’s whole model is to make almost everything itself: cells, chips, motors, seats, and a lot more. That’s a big reason it can sell a Seagull for around $10,000 in China and still make money. But it’s a labor-heavy model, and it works because Chinese factory labor is relatively cheap and plentiful. Toyota gets more than five times as many cars out of each employee. Tesla gets more than twice as many.

The problem is that BYD’s growth is now outside China, and that’s where this model gets tested. Only 6% of its workforce is abroad, yet 43% of its sales are. Tariffs in Europe, Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere are pushing BYD to build locally, but a factory in Hungary or Brazil won’t necessarily produce the same.

The number that should worry legacy automakers is the 120,000 engineers. That’s almost as many people as Tesla employs in total, all working on product.