From building dreams to breaking them: Warren Buffett’s favourite Chinese car maker BYD, otherwise known as Build Your Dreams, revealed a hope-shattering drop in third quarter earnings of 99 per cent on Tuesday.
It’s not a sign of anything terminal for the Shenzhen-based company in which Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has a 10 per cent stake. But it is a nightmarish sign (at least for investors whose optimism had not already been extinguished) that the golden days are over.
BYD on Tuesday was announcing results for the nine months to September, but a calculation based on its results for the first six months indicated that third quarter net earnings had plunged to just Rmb11.8m ($1.78m) compared with Rmb1.16bn in the same period last year.