The figure and how it splits
Wang gave the number on stage on Wednesday. About 960,000 of those people work in China and roughly 60,000 abroad, which is 5.9% of the total. Up to 120,000 are R&D engineers working on battery cells, motors, electronic controls and semiconductors.
The company started in 1994 as a battery maker. Wang credits vertical integration, with batteries, chips and motors kept in-house, for the move from component supplier to the world's biggest new energy vehicle manufacturer by volume.
Four years of sharp swings
BYD reported 570,100 employees at the end of 2022, 703,500 at the end of 2023 and 968,900 at the end of 2024. The 2025 annual report showed 869,600, a cut of about 99,000 concentrated in frontline production jobs.
Then the hiring restarted. S&P Global Market Intelligence put BYD at 911,900 at the end of June. From 869,600 to 1,020,000 is 150,400 people in ten months, or roughly 500 new employees a day.
Vehicles per employee
Headcount on its own says little about output. In 2025 BYD sold about 4.6 million vehicles with 869,600 employees, which works out at 5.3 per worker. Tesla delivered 1,636,129 vehicles with 134,785 people, about 12.1 per worker. Volkswagen Group reported 662,942 employees at the end of 2025 and sits at roughly 13.5 — high output per worker that has not translated into engineering reliability, as the Audi Q4 e-tron battery recall showed. Toyota, with 11.3 million group sales including Daihatsu and Hino, reaches about 29.
That gap needs one correction, and it is a large one. BYD's payroll includes BYD Electronic, its majority-owned contract manufacturer, with 165,000 employees of its own at the end of 2025. It also covers the battery business that supplies other carmakers, plus chips, motors, energy storage and rail transit. Strip out BYD Electronic and the carmaking figure comes to about 6.5 vehicles per worker. Better, and still less than a quarter of Toyota's number.
Hiring while sales fall
BYD sold 3,131,576 vehicles in the first nine months of 2026, down 3.9%. September was its best month at 463,561 units. First-half revenue of 344.8 billion yuan and net profit of 12.3 billion yuan were both lower than a year earlier.
Set against the current payroll, nine-month sales come to about 3.1 vehicles per employee, or roughly 4.1 annualised. Headcount is measured at the end of the period, so the number is approximate. It still sits under the 5.3 recorded for 2025.
Where the growth is
All of the expansion is abroad. International sales reached 1,342,960 units through September, up 92.7%, and now make up about 43% of total volume. Only 6% of the workforce is based outside China, so most export cars are still built at home and shipped, even as plants in Thailand, Brazil and Hungary come online.
For European pricing, that split is the part that counts. The EU charges countervailing duties on top of the 10% standard import tariff on Chinese-built BEVs — up to 45.3% combined duty, a ceiling rather than BYD's own rate. The combined duty applies to the vehicle, and we have covered how used Chinese EVs enter Europe around that tariff. Assembly in Hungary changes the duty position for new cars. It does not change the labour model behind them.
The 120,000 engineers
The engineering headcount is the number competitors watch. 120,000 R&D staff is about 89% of Tesla's entire global workforce of 134,785, and those engineers design parts that BYD then produces itself rather than buying from suppliers.
What that engineering output looks like in showrooms is easier to check than a conference speech. Specifications and European prices for the models that reach this market sit in our EV catalog, and the charging cost side can be run through the charging cost calculator at Czech and EU electricity tariffs.
The cost of the model
BYD can sell a Seagull for around $10,000 in China and still report a profit, and vertical integration is a big part of how. It is also a labour-heavy way to build cars, and it works on the assumption of cheap, plentiful factory labour in China. That is why the 5.3-vehicles-per-worker figure is not a temporary dip. It is what the business model costs.
As production moves into Hungary, Brazil and Thailand, the assumption gets tested. Wages, union agreements and local content rules in those countries differ from those in Shenzhen, and the per-car cost advantage that funds BYD's export push was built at home.
Wang's figure covers the whole group, not the car division alone. BYD has not published a 2026 annual headcount yet; the last reported year-end number was 869,600, and the 1.02 million is the chairman's own count from Wednesday's stage.
Source: https://electrek.co/2026/10/28/byd-1-million-employees-more-than-toyota-gm-ford-tesla/