Another Unexpected Loss for Tesla

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 4, 9:15AM EDT

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BYD is about to surpass Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) as global BEV leader.
Tesla suffered a decline in unit sales in the first quarter of 2025.

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By many measures, Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction) remains a large success. Its market cap is $860 billion, much higher than Ford’s $38 billion. The leader in global car sales, Toyota, has a market cap of $222 billion. And Tesla still controls about 40% of the electric vehicle (EV) market share in the United States. This is despite a decline in unit sales in the first quarter of 2025.

Tesla is about to lose its most important crown, which is its number one position in the global BEV (battery electric vehicle, which has no other engine) space, to China’s BYD. Counterpoint expects BYD to be the BEV leader in 2025. By the end of the year, it will have a global BEV market share of 15.7%. Tesla will be at 15.3%, and no other car company will have market share in the double digits.

Counterpoint Associate Director Liz Lee notes, “CEO Elon Musk has scored somewhat of an own goal against Tesla and we are about to catch a glimpse of how much the company’s sales were hurt in Q1 2025.” BYD has two big advantages. The first is that it dominated BEV sales in China, which is the largest EV market in the world by far. The other is that it appears BYD has developed technology to charge a car to the level where its range is 300 miles in just five minutes. For most traditional EV chargers, the number is closer to 20 minutes.

Experts could argue that BYD’s new market share position does not mean as much as it would appear at first glance. Its sales outside China are modest because of tariffs and the fact it does not have major production facilities elsewhere in the world. This has started to change, as its sales in Asia have begun to rise.

Tesla’s sales footprint encompasses the European Union, United States, and China. Despite a drop in first-quarter sales, it is a global company, while BYD is not. The frightening fact for Tesla shareholders is that BYD is aggressively expanding outside China. It believes it can double sales this year compared to last year. That will give it 800,000 sales outside its own market.

Elon Musk may be able to reverse Tesla’s sales slide with leading-edge AI-powered self-driving technology. However, BYD has self-driving products similar to those of Tesla. There is no reason to think it cannot keep pace with Tesla in this category.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.