BYD becomes the world's biggest electric car maker.
Everybody wants to be number one, so this always can be the motivation for everybody working hard.
European manufacturers will argue that Chinese brands are unfairly subsidised.
It's World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm Rahul Tandon.
So how have BYD overtaken Tesla?
We'll find out.
And we'll see why it's been a good start to the year for pasta lovers in the US.
So, as we heard there, the Chinese car company BYD has been crowned the world's biggest electric car maker.
Big moment for the company, big moment for China as well.
Let's give you some numbers.
It sold 2.26 million electric vehicles in 2025.
Held by expansion in Europe, where it's launched cars like the Dolphin Surf.
Are you ready for the green wave?
Let's say hi to the Dolphin Surf.
BYD has taken that title from Tesla.
Tesla sales fell 9% in 2025, the second year it has reported a drop.
That will come as a surprise to its founder, Elon Musk, who had this to say about BYD when he was asked about it on Bloomberg in 2011
There's competitors now ramping up and, as you're familiar with BYD, which is also on the West Coast, I think they're ramping up production of their electric vehicles.
Warren Buffett owns 10% stake in that.
Why do you laugh?
BYD is trying to compete.
Why do you laugh?
Have you seen their car?
You don't see them at all as a competitor?
No.
Why is that?
I mean, they offer a lower price point.
I don't think they have a great product.
Well, customers disagreed with Elon Musk, didn't they?
When you look at those numbers.
Someone who will not be surprised by today's figures is BYD's executive vice president, Stella Lee.
When she spoke to the BBC last year, she said that global growth was the company's priority.
Everybody wants to be number one.
So this always can be the motivation for everybody working hard.
We want to be one of the main players in each country.
Let us bring in Zak Shahan, who is CEO of Clean Technica, the website who has been following this battle between Tesla and BYD since when.
Zak
When did it start, do you think?
Well, I've been running this site since 2010 and covering Tesla since 2012.
And it was about that time that BYD had its first model, the E6, which was like a very low power vehicle, practical but not very exciting vehicle.
So Tesla started with the Model S, very exciting, expensive sedan.
BMW started with a low-cost, sort of taxi-oriented vehicle.
But both have obviously changed, evolved a lot over the past decade plus, or 15 years almost.
And both sort of have expanded in towards the other direction, you might say.
But BYD has expanded much, much further.
Yes, it has.
Now we and lots of other if you look at many financial newspapers, it's the main story on them think that this is a huge moment.
Is it that bigger moment?
Do you think?
I think it's a little funny because they actually passed up Tesla a long time ago.
They stopped selling anything but plug-in vehicles a couple of years ago.
And they passed up Tesla for total plug-in vehicle sales a while back.
But this is now the first year that they've outsold Tesla on fully battery electric vehicles.
But last year, they sold 4.5%. million vehicles, all plugins.
They sold 2.3 million full electrics.
So another couple million were plugin hybrids.
Whereas Tesla, as I think people have seen, just had a very bad year where they sold 16 million, which is down 9 from last year and down 10 from 2023.
So it's been two years of declining sales.
Stay with us.
Want to bring in Jennifer Schneider, financial advisor for Brighton Securities, based in Rochester in New York.
Zach said, you know, bad year for Tesla.
But if we look at that pay increase that Elon Musk got, the shareholders still seem pretty happy, don't they Jennifer?
Is that because he's not focusing on this area anymore?
It's all about autonomous driving for him, robots.
That very well could be the case.
They're definitely focused on AI, robo-taxi energy growth narrative and the energy revenue is up 49.
But essentially this is the battle of a broad and price-sensitive class of consumers, and that's what's happening.
It's a very popular market, the EV market.
It's growing.
So we're going to see competition.
Zach and that is an important point that Jennifer raises there about price, because a lot of European car companies Elon Musk probably says the same thing as well says it's not a level playing field because companies like BYD are being backed unfairly by the Chinese government with huge subsidies.
Yeah, I find it sort of a funny argument.
I mean, the US bailed out the auto companies... not that long ago.
They've given tons of subsidies to them.
Germany gives a lot of subsidies to Volkswagen and BMW and Mercedes and all kinds of supports.
I mean, China has...
I would say what it does is it sets very clear policy objectives, very clear economic objectives for the country and gives the signal to the markets that's very strong, that for the next several years we're going to be focusing on this topic.
They did it with solar and wind, solar panels and wind turbines, which we covered, that whole transition topic.
And they've done it with electric cars.
And they've gone now... Over 50% of their new vehicle sales are electric vehicles now.
And that's over half of the global EV market.
They...
Scaling up like that has allowed those companies to reach profitability, to bring down costs.
You get economies of scale.
So they've got a lot of things going for them in that regard.
BYD has launched a dozen new models in the past year.
They have 125,000 R&D engineers now.
This is crazy.
So they're constantly innovating.
They've rapidly increased the pace of innovation, the development time of new models and upgrades.
And it's hyper competitive in the market because automakers have dropped costs to try to compete with each other.
But they also just are constantly rolling out the newest, latest technology products.
Whether that's charging or powertrains or infotainment.
So it's a hyper-competitive market where a bunch of EV makers some traditional automakers, some EV startups have just been competing with each other at a rapid pace.
Yeah.
Yeah, which is what we've seen, haven't we?
And there's many other companies that are coming up in China as well.
Jennifer, there are many factors here.
Politics.
We know that in Europe a lot of customers have been put off by Elon Musk's political views.
But the simple fact is and we're all customers, we're all consumers if someone offers us a product and it's cheaper and as good as all the others out there, we'll buy it.
And that's what BYD is doing, isn't it?
I think there's definitely truth to that.
But aside from the product, you also want to look at who's behind it.
Do you believe in the message?
Other things that go into the sale of something per se.
So sometimes it's not just about the cost, but what is it that you're getting?
What's the value that you're getting from the entire experience?
Yep.
Let us see how that continues.
Last thoughts from you is that we mentioned politics.
We mentioned Elon Musk.
How much is that affecting Tesla's sales and the likes of Europe in particular?
Yeah, it's having a very strong effect.
I think it was researchers from Yale who recently tried to identify how many sales Tesla has lost from Elon Musk getting hyper radically political, and it was over a million sales.
It's definitely hit them, but I would say that another big part of what I mean I think that might be the biggest factor that's hit them, Elon getting extremely radically political.
But the other main thing is that They were supposed to grow 50 a year throughout this decade, 2020s.
On average, 50 a year.
And as I said, they've been declining the past couple of years.
They sacrifice, developing new models and sort of expanding their lineup, because what was supposed to drive that growth was the self-driving autonomous vehicles, the RoboTax capability.
And they're getting closer to that.
I have the full self-driving in my vehicle for years. the past six years, since 2019.
But that was supposed to be achieved like five years ago.
So they've lacked all of this growth from not achieving that quickly enough and from not doing something else to achieve growth, like expanding the lineup significantly other than the Cybertruck, for example, which has been a big, massive flop.
It certainly has.
A lot of people remember the visuals from that.
Zach, thank you so much for joining us here and running us through that.
Jennifer Schneider still with us.
Let's turn to some good news coming from the UK markets.
The FTSE 100 here has gone through the 10,000 mark for the first time.
Does that get a lot of coverage in the US?
Or are you all watching the Nasdaq and the Dow all the time?
Jennifer?
Oh, apologies.
Yes, we're definitely watching globally.
And the Western world is awash with capital and definitely bullish on most developed economies.
This is wonderful news.
Very exciting.
Yeah.
Why the UK in particular?
Why do you think it's gone through that mark?
Because, you know, growth is not that impressive here in the UK.
So it appears that with global liquidity, the easing inflation trends and expectations that rate cuts are approaching.
This is supportive for equities worldwide.
And S&P was up 18 percent, 25.
And granted, we saw the emerging markets and global international markets up 30 percent.
And this the S&P 500 tends to be this proxy for all other markets.
So just seeing this kind of trend go throughout is there, but there is always the caution of overvaluation, which we want to watch.
Yeah, and that brings us back to AI.
And that has had such a huge impact on many markets, but in particular, the US market.
Do you think people are still cautious around AI?
I think that there is definitely caution around AI, but it's not going anywhere.
We're still investing in technology.
It's the cutting edge of everything that is in front of us.
Every conversation we have is every fund, every ETF.
There is a significant percentage of technology that is in those.
So I still think that we are fair enough to say invest in these areas of the market and you will see the returns.
But, as always, diversification is extremely important and globally, as we can see what happened in 25.
Yeah, thank you for that.
Jennifer, have a listen to this, because we're going to talk about these continuing protests in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Today, Friday March, the sixth day in a row of nationwide anti-government protests triggered by a sharp drop in the value of the currency and the rising cost of living.
This young woman spoke to the BBC's NewsHour programme about why she's protesting.
All started from bazaar and all the shopkeepers and business people were protesting because they couldn't stand the economic situation anymore.
We cannot handle it anymore.
We cannot survive even with the economical situation that we have.
We don't have anything anymore.
Jennifer, one of the big problems is currency problems, the collapse of the Iranian currency.
When your currency collapses, what can governments do?
Well essentially, the prices would spike, savings would lose value and unrest would likely grow, prompting tighter government controls.
So essentially not good by any means.
And truly this is difficult to predict an outcome.
Big changes are on the horizon, but this is extremely serious.
You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
Let's talk about TikTok now because, of course, it is one of the most popular social media apps in the world, used by billions to create, watch and, of course, share short videos.
What began as a niche app for teenagers became a global trendsetter shaping music fashion, politics and humour.
Known as Douyun in China.
It launched internationally in 2017 and quickly grew into one of the most valuable brands on this planet, worth now more than 100 billion.
But it's also become, as we've reported on quite a lot, a political flashpoint in America.
As Niamh McDermott reports.
Welcome to a little day in my life.
I never do the... If you've ever wondered how influencers make money...
In the United States, 150 million people are on TikTok, and this time last year was the moment many of them had feared.
TikTok has stopped working in the United States.
It's disappeared from Apple and Google app stores too, as part of a blackout ahead of a law implementing its shutdown.
It was utter panic for me as a creator, just because at that time I was only prioritizing TikTok.
And that was an erroneous mistake on my part.
You know, really thinking that it wouldn't go away and having all of my income tied to that.
Cora Lakey is a social media content creator and influencer based in California.
It's been really interesting and humbling as a creator because I've seen these bureaucratic and business decisions sort of impact my business as a small business owner.
And so I ended up having to go back to corporate this year, while I sort of waited to see what was going on behind the scenes with the deal.
For now, TikTok remains online.
But to understand how it reached this point we need to look back at years of negotiations between the United States government and Chinese owner ByteDance.
The US government has been saying that ByteDance has to divest TikTok's US operations.
That's Emily Baker-White, a tech reporter and former lawyer.
She's also the author of Every Screen on the Planet, The War Over TikTok.
The US government was worried about two things.
They were worried that through ByteDance, the Chinese government might either gain access to private user data or somehow influence the messages that Americans were seeing on TikTok.
That was the American concern, but China saw it very differently.
Kerry Allen is the BBC's China media analyst.
Chinese government media firmly rejected suggestions that TikTok was a security risk.
It was their view that Trump was simply trying to suppress TikTok in the US due to its popularity over American competitors like Instagram and Facebook.
Media at the time also warned Chinese parent company ByteDance that divesting TikTok would mean that Chinese audiences might turn away from the firm, seeing TikTok as selling out to the US.
Although Donald Trump first floated the idea of banning TikTok back in 2020, the decisive moment came on the first day of his return to the White House.
TikTok's US blackout is over after President-elect Trump vowed to postpone the ban.
And that wasn't the first extension.
The clock will keep on ticking for TikTok as Donald Trump's set to extend the sale deadline.
Donald Trump has again extended a deadline.
President Trump has once again extended the deadline.
And while the clock was ticking, creators, users and even rival platforms were bracing for impact.
My payments on TikTok are honestly extremely inconsistent.
Here's content creator Cora Lakey again.
I've mainly seen most of my income on social media come from brand deals.
And surprisingly, Meta has really stepped it up this year.
And I think that is in direct reaction to TikTok.
I'm looking at things like building courses and building my own community and my own website and having my community have access to me outside of those platforms that we rely on, because it is incredibly scary.
As creators spread the risk across different platforms, political pressure was reaching its peak.
Now some breaking news to bring to you just coming to us.
TikTok says it signed a deal to sell its US entity to a joint venture controlled by American investors.
Back to Emily Baker-White, tech reporter and author of Every Screen on the Planet The War Over TikTok.
Trump administration has agreed, apparently with the Chinese government and with TikTok and ByteDance, that TikTok's US operations, minus some business decision making having to do with like advertising and e-commerce, will be turned over to a group of mostly American investors in the United States for the US portion of TikTok.
Those investors include tech company Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and Emirati-backed investment firm MGX.
The deal, which is set to close on the 23rd of January, means Americans can continue to scroll and create.
But what's in it for China?
Here's the BBC's Kerry Allen again.
TikTok has been a big success story for China.
People have been using its sister platform Douyin, for years and it's the backbone of China's influencer economy.
But the Chinese government often likes to send a message that hurting the Chinese people can result in a company losing a market that represents a fifth of the world's population.
So TikTok's future in the US seems to be a little clearer for now.
But globally, just how viable is being a content creator?
We're going to pick up on that point in a minute.
Let's bring Jennifer Schneider back into the conversation.
Here, difficult time for TikTok in the US.
Last year, much clearer path ahead for it and people who use it in 2026.
Yes, for sure.
TikTok, super successful company.
It's not going away and it's going to attract competition just with the whole AI push of everything and how we're evolving.
And after avoiding that US ban last year, the futures is still clouded by the national security data privacy concerns.
That's kind of creating that uncertainty and pushing people more towards meta, where they face fewer existential regulatory threats.
Let us see what happens there.
But what will be the next platform that content creators may look to?
Well, we've brought two together.
Arnold May is the co-founder of Quiment, a digital creative agency in London and Shanghai.
And Sukrit Jain, or as he's better known on his social media, handled a great Indian foodie as a full-time content creator in India, where TikTok is banned and has been since 2020.
I think it won't be another five to 10 years before we see completely new format, like what TikTok did to what I call second gen, which is Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
It flipped the format completely.
I think the next one will probably be more focused on like RIL streaming.
And that's picking up already among like Gen Alpha, where you see a lot of like live streamers, platforms like Kik and Twitch doing really well.
I think that's just the start of it.
We saw, for example, short form video doing really well with Vine before TikTok became mainstream.
I think we're seeing the same thing with IRL streaming.
As we evolve social media, people want to be more intimate with their creators.
And I think live is the next step.
So I would actually want to see a platform that is totally AI-based, which picks up anything that comes on my mind.
It shows me the same thing.
Eventually, if I even say something, for example, if I say I want to have Chole Batura right now, there must be a lot of Chole Baturas around me.
And, you know, getting up a place and everything, something I
Instagram did really well on IGTV.
IGTV was Instagram's television.
It was basically the long format television program in which a creator could upload 8 to 10 minutes of their videos and eventually people could watch it.
Just like YouTube, it was the same thing that Instagram had launched.
I want something AI-based long format video and, apart from that, something having filters of Snapchat.
Fascinating to hear those thoughts from two content creators.
You heard the phrase choli battura, if you don't know what that is.
But choli is an Indian version of chickpeas.
Battura is like an Indian bread and it's very tasty.
We're going to stay on a food theme because we like to bring you some good news here on World Business Report.
So this headline caught our attention.
Good news for pasta lovers.
Italy says the U.S. has sharply lowered proposed tariffs on several Italian pasta makers.
So, as you heard there, Italian pasta is said to be spared from those high-level US tariffs that President Trump's administration had threatened against 13 producers, which were up to 90 92 in some cases.
Jennifer, we look at so many signs of what President Trump's mind, where it's moving on tariffs.
The fact that he's backtracked here, can we read more into it, or is it just that he may like pasta?
I think he just likes pasta.
If you go to any town across the United States, there'll be a bank, there'll be a gas station and there's going to be an Italian restaurant.
So I think it's good for the U.S. and I'm a pasta fan myself.
So I approve.
OK, what's your favorite pasta?
Oh, goodness.
I knew this was coming and I thought about it and it's going to have to be raviolis.
Big fan.
OK, very good.
Very good.
Well, we thought we'd get some more reaction from somebody who uses a lot of pasta.
That is the Italian-American chef and restauranteur Salvo Lacoste.
He is an Italian-American chef and restauranteur.
He owns the restaurant Casa Lava in Manhattan in New York.
Today I wake up with a very beautiful news that, President Trump, I want to put down the tariff of the pasta.
I have more friends in the Italian government for this.
I call today, I send a message.
Just Monday is the last tariff of the pasta.
Before Christmas, the price is...
When the tariffs were in place, and they were 91.74% in some cases, what did you do?
I stopped the importing of pasta.
I make the pasta.
I prepare every day the fresh pasta in my laboratory.
Fettuccine, spaghetti, paccheri, rigatoni.
I prepare everything.
I import just the flour.
And I have to say, can you please stop naming all your pastas?
Because I'm just feeling very hungry during this conversation.
Now that those tariffs look like they're going to be reduced substantially...
Will you import the pastor again or will you continue making it yourself?
No, the tariff is the new tariff.
I imported the pasta because it's very different.
The dry pasta in Italy is very good.
It's very artisanal.
It's bronze.
The Italian pasta is the best culture in the world.
And normally I won't import the pasta with the new tariff.
In this tariff, no.
I put the double price for the pasta.
I don't want to exchange my price for my guests.
So you were making your own.
Can I ask you, when you were making your own rather than importing it in from Italy, did your customers notice a difference?
Did anybody say to you, this isn't the same as what we were having before?
No.
You don't have a more different, because the fresh pasta is a very good product.
One second.
Just the fettuccine pappardelle.
For example, this is one pasta that now I look, that I prepare every day.
It's pappardelle.
It's a typical Tuscany pasta that I prepare with beef ragout.
Sounds delicious.
Sounds delicious.
You are happy because now it looks like the tariffs have been reduced.
Are you worried though, that at some point Donald Trump may change his mind again and those tariffs could go back up, and that could cause a problem for you in your restaurant once again?
I'm confident that President Trump is very intelligent.
I think that President Trump, I love the pasta.
Probably the tariff from Monday is very good, very acceptable for the importance.
OK, final question for you.
You are now very happy with President Trump.
If he came to your restaurant, what would you cook him?
What pasta would you give him?
Said the President Trump arrival in my restaurant, I prepare for the first pasta.
I want to prepare the fettuccine casa salvo with beef ragu and vegetables and tomatoes and balsam.
And the second pasta, I want to prepare one rigatoni Trump pasta.
I invented this new pasta just for the president.
The president ate this pasta.
I put very down the tariff.
I love so much the pasta.
Salvo Locostro there from his restaurant, Casa Salvo.
Do you fancy it?
Trump rigatoni, Jennifer?
I love that idea.
I just know that right now in the US it is dinner time and I know what I'm having for dinner tonight.
Yeah, you with your ravioli once again.
Can I ask you, Taris was one of the dominant conversations on this programme in 2025.
It's going to be one of the dominant conversations in 2026.
Do you want to predict where we're going to go with Taris?
Well, they obviously create a lot of revenue in the US, which we're trying to take the stress out of taxes and things of that nature.
It also shook up the global economy in ways that shook it at first.
And then we see some positives and some green lights, markets, global markets, all time high.
I think we're going to continue on this trend.
I think we've got some powerful people in play and it looks good.
Jennifer, thank you for joining us on the programme.
Off you go.
Go and have some ravioli for dinner there.
Yep, I think tariffs are definitely going to be one of the terms that we will be looking at talking a lot about here on World Business Report over the next 12 months or so.
That is it for this edition and that is it for this week as well.
