China's BYD Auto slashes 2010 sales target by 25%

Just the other day, we touched on some of the struggles encountered by China's BYD Auto. In that article, we made mention of the fact that BYD would likely fall well short of its sales target of 800,000 units by year's end. Well, it appears as though even BYD agrees with us and has now slashed its 2010 sales target by 25 percent. BYD officially announced its new target of 600,000 sales for this calendar year with BYD spokesperson Henry Li saying, "China's car market is still good in the second half although growth will probably not be as strong as the first half."

Though BYD has decreased its sales outlook, newly released numbers show that the company is actually faring quite well. For the first half of 2010, BYD sold 289,000 cars in China, a 63.5 percent improvement over numbers posted for the same period in 2009. Additionally, the company reports that sales rose 15.4 percent in July. BYD anticipates a drop off for the rest of 2010 as China moves towards its typically slow auto sales season. BYD also reports that first-half exports nearly quadrupled the 2009 numbers, but at a paltry 8,000 units, exports still make up a minute fraction of the company's total sales. Additionally, BYD's hybrids and electric vehicles still represent just a minuscule portion of the company's overall production volume.

[Source: Reuters]