Chinese manufacturing giant BYD, with its 160,000 employees – including 10,000 engineers – has global ambitions, as it leads the posse down electric avenue, writes CLIFFORD COONAN

THE SHENZHEN corporate headquarters of BYD, which stands for Biyadi Qiche, but which the company likes to translate into English as “Build Your Dreams”, are in a hexagonal building, which looks a little like the Pentagon.

In this vast rechargeable-battery and electric-car plant, workers in jumpsuits zip around the factory on electric-powered golf carts, or in the new electric cars the company expects will help it to dominate the world market for environmentally sustainable transport.

With 160,000 employees and rising, including 10,000 engineers, BYD has global ambitions. It’s a new kind of Chinese company, one that flies in the face of the popular image of Chinese firms as low-cost producers lacking innovation but rich in cash, and hampered by a lack of vision and old-fashioned business models.

Occasionally you see a big blue dirty diesel lorry and it’s a strange sight, like spotting a long extinct dinosaur from another era.

Viewed from behind the wheel of a five-seat e6, the all-electric saloon with which BYD hopes to start its green-tech revolution, the lorry is indeed an ancient relic. The smooth passage of the car through the campus-like headquarters, where 40,000 people work, is emblematic of why Warren Buffet spent $250 million (€177 million) to buy a 10 per cent stake in the company.

“We can manufacture the entire car ourselves – the chassis, the electronics, everything, except for the glass and the tyres,” says Edward Zhou, senior vice president of BYD’s overseas office. There is a suggestion in this comment that China’s tyre-makers and glass factories had better be careful.

Zhou is watching this correspondent with an anxious expression, as I had just made the classic error that people driving electric cars always do – I tried to start the car when it was already running, so quiet is the engine.

As it stands, lithium ion batteries are expensive and therefore electric cars are dear, but China is a master at bringing down these kind of costs – remember how much a flat-screen TV used to cost before people started making them in China.

Wang Chuanfa, founder of BYD and China’s richest man, is particularly successful at bringing down the cost of batteries.

A chemist by training who was working in research for the government, Wang borrowed a couple of hundred thousand euros from his relatives in 1995, rented a small factory and the then 29 year old started making rechargeable batteries.

He grew up in dire poverty, with his farmer parents both dying while he was young, and like many of the entrepreneurs building China’s boom over the last three decades, Wang is a driven man.

He is a modest figure, who still eats in the company canteen and lives with his wife and two children in a BYD-owned housing complex on the campus, where all the other employees live too.

Very early on, Wang realised that China’s vast labour supply was cheaper than installing machinery.

He is also focused on building a domestic brand that Chinese people really want to buy, rather than just buy because it is cheaper than an import. He also wants to build a brand that will sell abroad.

Last year, the Hurun rich list put his personal wealth at $5.1 billion (€3.6 billion), making him the richest man in China.

His executives swell with pride in the corporate museum as they tell of how he worked out how to make batteries cheaper than Sony and Sanyo to become of the biggest mobile phone battery makers in the world.

The museum has cases full of batteries and also the BYD-designed handsets branded as Motorola, Sony, Samsung and Nokia, all side by side in the glass cases. While consumers pay to buy different brands, BYD makes batteries for everyone, and a large number of handsets. Then the big telcos brand them. BYD manufactures, the rest is marketing.

The company has fought a number of lawsuits from battery manufacturers, charged with stealing ideas, but the plaintiffs have been unsuccessful.

There is innovation everywhere, mostly in process. For example BYD has developed its own way of manufacturing Physical Vapour Deposition (PVD) coatings for making plastic look like metal.

BYD does conventional cars as well, and is China’s fourth largest carmaker, selling 450,000 vehicles there in 2009, a 180 per cent increase from a year earlier.

“The F3 was the bestselling car in China last year,” says Zhou, patting the sedan in pride of place in the auto section of the museum. This year BYD hopes to sell 800,000 vehicles in China and to become the nation’s largest carmaker in 2015, and the world’s biggest by 2025.

When it came to making electric cars, BYD’s background as a battery maker helped it to break out early with a new model – basically it just needed to put a chassis and a roof around the batteries it had already developed.

And it’s leading the electric car field globally, so far anyway, stealing a march on GM, Nissan, and Toyota.

There was a serious buzz around BYD at the Detroit auto show this year, when it unveiled a four-door e6 and said it would have the electric car ready for sale in North America by the end of 2010.

The group plans to introduce a few hundred e6s in the US next year. The e6 takes seven to nine hours to fully charge and has a 328km range, a maximum speed of 139km per hour and operates at a third of the cost of a comparable petrol-powered vehicle. It will initially retail at around $40,000 (€27,000).

The e6 will be launched in China in the first half of this year, mainly supplying government, public services and taxi fleets. The car is powered up by a home charging station and BYD also hopes to establish a network of charging poles at offices and supermarkets.

A prototype public charging station is located on campus, the petrol station of the future except no fossil fuels here, this is all electricity provided by solar power, charging up a public bus and another e6 saloon.

Wang certainly puts his money where his mouth is when it comes to investing in green technology, and his interest in environmental sustainability comes from a pragmatic belief that it is the way of the future, particularly as China tries to produce energy in a more sustainable way.

In late January, BYD said it would invest 22.5 billion yuan (€2.34 billion) over five years to build China’s largest solar power battery plant. BYD will build the plant in Shaanxi province, and it will have capacity to produce a total of 5,000 megawatts of batteries.

Beside the charging station of the future is a zero-emission house, and Wang likes to hold meetings in his house of the future. It’s a comfortable dwelling, not overly lavish, and the message it gives is that the future will be sustainable, but don’t expect too many frills.

Very much the overall message of the BYD group.