When readers ask me about my next ten bagger, I point them to the Chinese electric car company “Build Your Dreams” (BYDDF) (click here for their website). The stock is up 450% since I first mentioned it in March, and up 250% since my follow up in June. CEO Wang Chuan-Fu, who Charlie Munger describes as a combination of General Electric’s (GE) legendary manager, Jack Welch, and inventor Thomas Edison, scraped up $300,000 from relatives to start a knock off cell phone battery company in Shenzen in 1995. He grew the company into a massive, vertically integrated conglomerate, employing 130,000 workaholics at 11 factories, including those in Hungary, Romania, and India (interesting choices). BYD bought a defunct car company in 2003, and re-engineered it to launch the $22,000 F3DM sedan last year, an old technology ferrous oxide based plug-in hybrid that gets 62 miles on a charge. General Motors (GMX) Volt and Toyota’s (TM) plug in Prius, which won’t come out until next year, will only get 40 miles per charge and cost more. All-electric models are coming out this year. Warren Buffet was so impressed, he made a rare foreign investment last October, asking for a 25% stake and settling for 10% for $230 million. In a year the Oracle of Omaha has earned a tidy $800 million on the postion. Wang, who has already earned himself a place on the Forbes 400 list, intends to build BYD into the world’s largest automaker, and quickly.
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