In the late 1990s, BYD’s Stella Li landed in Rotterdam armed with $30,000, (€26,000) a container load of the Chinese group’s lithium-ion batteries and an order from head office: sell them to survive.
With two other people in her team, she clinched a deal to supply its batteries to Nokia, the number one mobile phone manufacturer at the time.
“I opened the door and moved BYD to another level,” said Li.
Since then, the company has moved far past its roots as a battery maker to become one of the world’s most powerful manufacturers of electric vehicles – but Li remains at the heart of its global expansion.
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In a series of interviews , the 55-year-old businesswoman, who serves as BYD’s executive vice-president under founder and chair Wang Chuanfu, spoke about the stakes for the company, which are just as existential as it tries to take on the likes of Toyota and Tesla.
“My dream is in five years, you’re walking in a supermarket and everyone will know BYD as a high-tech company,” she said.
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BYD is now the world’s largest and fastest-growing producer of electric vehicles (EVs). Along with factories in Brazil, Hungary, Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey and Uzbekistan, it is constructing a fleet of eight purpose-built vessels to ship its cars.
Li has been charged with an ambitious long-term annual sales target of 10mn cars, with half coming from outside China, up from a forecast of 4.6 million this year.
Her overseas push has taken on greater importance in recent months. BYD’s domestic outlook has darkened amid intensifying competition and Beijing’s “anti-involution” campaign to rein in cut-throat pricing and ruthless industry practices. Sales in China fell in September for the first time in 19 months, though the carmaker’s EVs still maintain nearly 30 per cent market share.
At the same time, BYD must grapple with the risks of rising western protectionism and a wave of Chinese rivals exporting the country’s price wars. Foreign governments have moved to limit shipments, with the US in effect banning imports and the EU raising tariffs.
It will be “very difficult for BYD to continue to grow the way it’s been growing”, said Tu Le, founder of the Sino Auto Insights consultancy, but he believed Li was up to the challenge.
“She believes in her products and believes that the BYD products are better priced than any other product out there,” he said.
In response to the threat of rising western protectionism, Li said: “We pay less attention to politics because ... consumers really decide who is the winner.”
Li is directly involved in pricing and model selection for each country the company enters, said people close to her. This is even though she has a network of regional and country managers.
“It’s really just the Stella show,” said a person close to Li. “I don’t know how she does it.”
Friends, business partners and employees said Li’s optimism for BYD had not wavered since her earliest days with the group.
After graduating from Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University, Li said she searched for a “good paying job” that would allow her to buy plane tickets for her parents instead of train tickets.
Following a role at a trade-focused media company, she joined BYD in 1996 as a marketing manager, a year after Wang founded the company to make batteries for mobile phones.
While Li has led the international expansion efforts, 59-year-old Wang is the engineer behind the group’s rapid technological advancements and manufacturing prowess.
“Mr Wang is my role model,” said Li. “He is really committed to do one thing – his dream was EV and this never changed.”
Several people familiar with the matter said Li was Wang’s partner professionally and personally. In China, business founders’ immediate family members – including spouses, siblings and children – often have key roles in management and governance.
BYD declined to comment on the nature of their relationship, while Li told the FT: “I own my position because of my work.”
The Shenzhen-based company, which is also a key Apple battery supplier, was little known outside China until the late 2000s, when Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway invested $230mn in the company.
Buffett’s partner, the late Charlie Munger, said he saw in Wang a mix of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch, the former General Electric chief. According to Li, Munger once told Wang: “Just do whatever you want and we will support you.”
Berkshire gradually sold down its stake in BYD, completing the exit this year after netting a return of about $7 billion, according to some estimates.
Overseas sales are now seen by the company as an antidote to brutal price wars at home. BYD’s average domestic selling price is 130,000 renminbi (($18,250), generating a gross margin of 18 per cent, compared with 27 per cent on a price of 180,000 renminbi (for cars sold abroad), according to UBS data.
This implies that each car sold overseas nets two to three times as much profit as in China.
In a sign of the intense pressure to expand, Bono Ge, who heads BYD’s business in the UK, was told by Li last spring to increase monthly sales in the country fivefold to 2,000 vehicles, a target he initially said felt unrealistic.
BYD well exceeded that target last month, selling a record 11,271 vehicles, a near 10-fold jump from the previous year, and catapulting the UK to BYD’s biggest market outside China. Asked what would have happened if he had not delivered, Ge said he would have been replaced.
Li continues to run a relentless travel schedule, meeting heads of state and key ministers in foreign governments and establishing relationships with car dealerships.
In Australia, the group poached senior executives from its rivals, formed a partnership with Nick Politis, owner of the country’s largest car dealership group, and sponsored his rugby league club, the Sydney Roosters.
The local dealers’ association forecasts that in a decade, 40 per cent of cars sold in Australia will be Chinese-made, led by BYD, up from 17 per cent this year and 2 per cent five years ago.
In addition to selling cars, Li is charged with obtaining concessions such as uninterrupted, cheap power supply for BYD’s overseas factories, said a person close to Li, as well as securing foreign customers for the company’s energy storage systems, an overlooked part of BYD’s business.
As BYD closes in on annual overseas sales of 1 million cars this year – more than double last year’s total – it is also working to address missteps made in the breakneck expansion of the past few years. The company has told investors that customer service, marketing and inventory controls can be improved.
Another executive at a European dealer said BYD needed to recruit more executives for its international business and delegate some of Li’s responsibilities to local management. “You can’t rely on Stella alone,” he said.
BYD has faced other challenges. It has denied allegations of “slavery-like conditions” for workers building a factory in Brazil, saying it had an “unwavering commitment to human and labour rights” and that it fully complied with Brazilian law.
The reaction was similar when rising geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing thwarted BYD’s plans for a factory in Mexico. “We just have to do our job,” said Li.
There are concerns in some of these countries about job creation. A person close to Li said overseas factories would have high levels of automation using BYD’s internal robotics expertise.
The carmaker said in a statement its expansion would bring “not only thousands of direct local jobs in factories but also enormous benefits for the regional supply chains”, as would be shown by its new facility in Hungary and elsewhere.
Jean-Francois Baril, the chair of Nokia owner HMD Global who has known Li for more than two decades – including once fielding an offer to drive the company’s first car in 2003 – said in that time she had not changed.
“Stella was bridging the east and the west,” he said. “Without her, I don’t think Dr Wang would have captured western customers like us.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
