(Yicai) Dec. 16 -- BYD’s factory in the Chinese city of Xi'an has become the auto giant’s first to produce more than one million vehicles in a year, according to a local newspaper.

Xi’an Daily reported on Dec. 14 that the plant in Xi’an, the capital of China’s northwestern Sha’anxi province, produced its one-millionth vehicle of this year on Dec. 13.

BYD has nine car production bases in China, and that in Xi’an is the only one to have achieved the milestone, Feng Lei, director of the Hangzhou Huoshi Creation Data Industry Research Institute, told Yicai. The factory has the capacity to turn out 1.5 million vehicles, he added.

Shenzhen-based BYD was the world's top-selling maker of battery electric vehicles last year, surpassing Tesla, and also sold the most cars in China, overtaking Volkswagen. Its plant in Xi’an is the country’s largest auto factory.

BYD started making cars in Xi’an, where it has also based its auto parts business to form a complete supply chain. In 2022, Xi’an’s output of new energy vehicles neared 1.02 million units, 995,000 or almost 98 percent of which were produced by BYD.

The company’s factories in Changsha and Zhengzhou can produce 900,000 and 500,000 vehicles a year, respectively, with plans to expand to one million each. Its Hefei plant has an annual output of 500,000, but has plans for 1.32 million by 2025. Most of BYD’s other factories can make 300,000 to 500,000 vehicles a year.

The BYD models produced in Zhengzhou and Hefei are not as good as those made in Xi’an, so it is unlikely that their production capacities will reach that of the Xi’an plant any time soon, Feng noted.

The next three to five years will be a pivotal period of restructuring in China’s NEV industry, Feng said, adding that even though BYD does not have a particularly large production capacity at the moment, it could expand through the acquisition and consolidation of existing plants.

Editor: Futura Costaglione