BYD’s Hungary Probe Clouds a Global Sales Surge as a Former Diplomat’s Switch Draws Scrutiny
Published on 07/21/2026 at 14:24 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The Chinese electric-vehicle giant BYD is navigating a period of extraordinary expansion abroad and intensifying political headwinds at home and in Europe. Even as its shares ride a modest recovery and its export machine notches records from Brazil to Germany, a Hungarian investigation into alleged cronyism has thrust the company into a diplomatic firestorm that shows no sign of cooling.
At the centre of the affair is Péter Szijjártó, Hungary’s former foreign minister, who resigned his parliamentary seat on 15 July to take up a leadership role at BYD. During his twelve-year tenure, Szijjártó played a pivotal role in luring the Chinese carmaker’s first European factory to Hungary in 2023 and later helped secure state support for a European headquarters and research centre in Budapest. The government now says it will review all subsidies, tax breaks, permits, and environmental approvals granted while Szijjártó was in office. The sums involved are eye-catching: Hungary committed 20 billion forint (roughly $63.7 million) to the headquarters project, while separate pledges for the combined HQ and R&D facility have been valued at nearly $934 million. Critics allege that Szijjártó mobilised “hundreds of billions of forint” in public funds for BYD, a claim the administration of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is now investigating. The controversy is amplified by Szijjártó’s close ties to Moscow; he faced criticism for travelling to Russia to broker oil-and-gas deals and for holding phone calls with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during EU meetings.
Political turmoil, however, has done little to blunt BYD’s operational momentum. The company’s Yangwang U9 Track Edition smashed a speed record on the Papenburg test track in Germany, clocking 293.54 miles per hour (472.4 km/h) – comfortably ahead of the Rimac Nevera R and the Aspark Owl. Driver Marc Basseng piloted the four-motor, 3,000-horsepower hypercar, which rides on a 1,200-volt architecture. On the more prosaic side of the business, BYD’s Brazilian factory in Camacari celebrated its 100,000th electric vehicle in mid-July, built by 5,500 workers. The first phase of the plant has an annual capacity of 150,000 units, with a long-term target of 600,000. Exports to Brazil hit 186,921 vehicles between January and May 2026, making it BYD’s largest market outside China, ahead of Australia and the UK. Meanwhile, the company has open orders for 50,000 vehicles each from Argentina and Mexico, where it launched the Seal 05 DM-i under the name BYD King – a plug-in hybrid with a combined NEDC range of up to 1,680 kilometres.
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Germany offers an even starker illustration of BYD’s European push. In June, the company sold 6,259 vehicles in the country – a staggering 273.7% jump from the same month a year earlier. To support that growth, BYD plans to invest €2 billion in building 3,000 fast-charging points across Germany. The overall export target for 2026 stands at 1.5 million vehicles. All this comes despite US tariffs of 100% and an effective import ban on Chinese EVs, as well as EU retaliatory duties that have pushed the average tariff on Chinese-made battery EVs to 17% in the first quarter of 2026 – down from a peak of 22% in 2024. BYD doubled its BEV shipments into the EU even under the lower tariff, while rival SAIC, facing a 35% levy, halved its volumes. Stella Li, BYD’s chairwoman, has said the company can overtake Toyota as the world’s biggest automaker without ever selling a car in the United States. Toyota sold roughly 4.46 million vehicles globally from January to May 2026, down 3.1%, while BYD’s full-year 2025 tally was about 4.5 million. In the first half of 2026, BYD delivered 1.81 million new-energy vehicles, including 792,256 from overseas.
Yet the home market remains a drag. China’s CPCA expects retail sales to fall 14% to 20.4 million vehicles in 2026, after 23.7 million in 2025. First-half sales already dropped 20.2% to 8.7 million, and industry gross margins have shrunk to 3.4%. BYD, along with Geely, Leapmotor, Volkswagen, and Toyota, is seen by analysts as one of the likely survivors of the brutal price war. A fresh headwind arrives on 1 September 2026, when a consumption tax on lithium batteries kicks in at 2%, rising to 4% in 2027 (sodium-ion and solid-state batteries are exempt until end-2028). BYD’s 2025 revenue stood at 803.96 billion yuan, while net profit slipped 18.97% to 32.62 billion yuan, implying a per-vehicle profit of around 6,800 to 8,400 yuan. The stock has been stable despite the Hungary probe, last changing hands at €10.06, up 5.09% over seven trading days. That still leaves it 32% below its 52-week high from 22 July 2025, and 5.72% beneath its 200-day moving average – a sign that the recovery has yet to fill the hole carved by last year’s decline.
Product news continues to flow. Denza, BYD’s luxury sub-brand, unveiled the production version of the Z9S, a 1,194-horsepower model with a 102.326-kWh battery and fast-charging technology; Denza sold 18,631 units in June. A less welcome headline came from Chengdu, where a BYD Qin Plus DM-i caught fire after a multi-vehicle collision. The driver and passenger escaped through the windows, and no injuries were reported; the cause is under investigation. The Qin Plus accounted for 13,726 deliveries in June, or 7.7% of BYD’s total sales. For now, the company’s trajectory seems unimpeded by either the political noise or the isolated incident – but investors will be watching closely to see whether the Hungarian probe deepens and whether the domestic price war squeezes margins further.
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