BYD

Target Profile

• Company: BYD Co., Ltd. (比亚迪股份有限公司)
• Jurisdiction: People’s Republic of China (Shenzhen Stock Exchange: 002594; Hong Kong Stock Exchange: 1211)
• Headquarters: Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China
• Sector: Electric vehicles, battery energy storage, electric buses, commercial vehicles
• Relevant operating footprint: Israeli passenger EV market (via exclusive distributor Shlomo Motors); Israeli public transit (Egged electric bus fleet); former IDF officer vehicle leasing pool; Israeli government vehicle procurement (GVA tender); Israeli automotive cybersecurity certification supply chain (Karamba Security)
• Key executives or governance actors: Wang Chuanfu (Chairman and founder); Asi Shmeltzer (Shlomo Group, distributor-side); Shlomo Shmeltzer (Shlomo Group founder)
• BDS-1000 score: 207
• Tier: D (200–399)

Executive Summary

BYD Co., Ltd. is the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer by volume, headquartered in Shenzhen and dual-listed in China and Hong Kong. Its Israel exposure is entirely transactional rather than structural: BYD holds no directly owned assets in Israel, employs no Israeli staff, and has executed no direct contracts with Israeli government or defence bodies. All market activity flows through an exclusive distribution agreement with Shlomo Motors Ltd., a subsidiary of the privately held Shlomo Group.

Despite that mediated structure, BYD’s footprint in Israel is substantial and spans multiple domains. In the military domain, BYD Atto 3 passenger vehicles entered Israeli Defence Force operational custody through a civilian leasing tender, resulting in a 2024 Shin Bet and National Cyber Directorate security suspension and a January 2026 IDF Chief of Staff order banning Chinese vehicles from military bases. In the digital domain, BYD has confirmed direct procurement relationships with two Israeli-origin technology vendors: Karamba Security (VCode binary analysis, compliance-critical for UN R155 certification) and Mobileye (EyeQ ADAS compute, active status unresolved). In the economic domain, BYD ranks as the dominant electric bus supplier to Israeli public transit and ranked sixth overall among all OEMs in Israel for cumulative sales in January–October 2025. In the political domain, BYD maintains complete public silence on the Israel-Palestine conflict, frames all Israel communications in commercial terms, and has no documented lobbying, donations, or political advocacy.

The composite BDS-1000 score of 207 places BYD at the low end of Tier D. The dominant scoring constraint across all four domains is distributor mediation: Shlomo Motors is the contracting entity with Israeli market actors, capping proximity scores. The Customer Cap rubric governs V-DIG, where BYD is exclusively a buyer of Israeli-origin technology. No foreign direct investment, R&D presence, or confirmed direct military procurement channel was identified. The score would increase materially if primary IDF procurement documentation confirmed a formal Ministry of Defence tender rather than a civilian leasing mechanism, if the Mobileye Surround relationship were confirmed as ongoing for new model programmes, or if Shlomo Motors were documented as receiving Israeli state honours or making military-welfare donations.

Timeline of Relevant Events

Corporate Overview

BYD Co., Ltd. was founded in 1995 by Wang Chuanfu in Shenzhen as a rechargeable battery manufacturer; it entered automotive production in 2003 through the acquisition of a state-owned automaker. Today BYD is the world’s largest EV manufacturer by volume, producing passenger cars, electric buses, commercial vehicles, electric forklifts, and battery energy storage systems. Its product catalogue is civilian in orientation throughout, with no publicly marketed military or tactical variants.¹⁴

BYD is dual-listed in Shenzhen (A-shares: 002594) and Hong Kong (H-shares: 1211). Material shareholders include Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett), which has been conducting a staged partial divestiture since 2022, and Chinese state-affiliated institutional funds consistent with BYD’s designation as a strategically important national new energy vehicle champion under PRC industrial policy. No Israeli-domiciled parent entity or beneficial owner with material Israeli financial exposure has been identified.

In Israel, BYD has no directly owned offices, showrooms, warehouses, service centres, or manufacturing infrastructure. Its passenger vehicle business is entirely mediated through Shlomo Motors Ltd., a subsidiary of the privately held Shlomo Group (founder: Shlomo Shmeltzer; current leadership: Asi Shmeltzer).¹⁵ The distribution arrangement was formally announced in August 2022 and is structured as a manufacturer–exclusive distributor agreement; no BYD equity stake in Shlomo Motors has been confirmed from public disclosures. For electric buses, Shlomo Motors has served as the commercial interface with Israeli transit operators since at least 2017.²

The Shlomo Group is a large, diversified Israeli conglomerate with business lines including vehicle importation and leasing (Shlomo Sixt), construction and engineering (Afcon Holdings), financial services, and other sectors. Its subsidiary Afcon Holdings is documented by Who Profits Research Center as a provider of security systems and construction services connected to Israeli military and detention infrastructure.¹⁶ BYD’s connection to these activities is structural — arising from shared Shlomo Group parentage with its distributor — rather than direct or operational.

Domain Summaries

V-MIL: Military

Mechanism of Involvement

BYD’s entry into the Israeli military domain occurred entirely through civilian commercial channels. The IDF Technology and Logistics Directorate administered a vehicle leasing tender for electric and hybrid command vehicles for commissioned officers at Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel rank. The BYD Atto 3 — a standard commercial electric SUV sold to Israeli consumers through Shlomo Motors — was among the vehicle models selected under this tender.⁸ A parallel Government Vehicle Administration (GVA) tender, covering civilian and security agencies including the Israel Police, also shortlisted BYD vehicles.⁸ Both procurement instruments were civilian leasing frameworks, not formal Ministry of Defence military procurement pathways; no end-user certificates, export control reviews, or military-specification modifications specific to the IDF supply have been identified.

Reporting indicates that over 600 Chinese-manufactured EVs — including BYD Atto 3 units alongside Chery Tiggo 8 Pro models — entered Ministry of Defence custody under these arrangements.⁸ This figure derives from secondary aggregator reporting; primary IDF tender documentation has not been publicly released. The vehicles entered IDF operational possession as standard commercial units identical to those sold to private consumers. No contract modifications, military-specification adaptations, or named end-user certificates connecting BYD to Israeli defence use have been identified in public records.

The security controversy that followed did not involve BYD taking any deliberate action to supply the Israeli military. The supply chain ran through Shlomo Motors as an authorised commercial importer; the IDF selected the Atto 3 through a normal civilian leasing process. BYD issued no statement specifically acknowledging the deployment. The mechanism of military entry was therefore inadvertent from BYD’s perspective as a manufacturer, mediated through a third-party distributor under a civilian procurement instrument — a characterisation that the scoring rubric captures through the Low / Direct Civilian Supply band for Impact and the distributor-mediated proximity discount.

BYD’s electric bus deployments constitute a second, less direct military-adjacent activity. BYD has been the dominant supplier of electric buses to Egged, Israel’s national bus operator, since at least 2017, with confirmed deliveries across Haifa (2017), Jerusalem (2018, 2019), and the landmark 100-bus tender in 2021.⁵ Egged operates bus routes serving Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.¹⁷ Whether BYD-branded bus chassis are operationally assigned to settlement-serving routes — as opposed to diesel or other rolling stock — is not confirmed from available sources; Egged’s fleet includes vehicles from multiple manufacturers, and route-level fleet assignment is not publicly disclosed.

In January 2026, the Israeli Ministry of Defence and IDF Chief of Staff formally ordered the removal of Chinese-manufactured vehicles, explicitly including BYD, from military bases and prohibited future procurement, citing documented concerns about onboard sensors, cameras, and connectivity systems as potential intelligence-gathering vectors.¹² This order confirms that a former operational relationship existed (indirect, via civilian leasing) and has now been formally severed by Israeli state action. The ban does not affect BYD’s civilian and transit market operations.

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

The most significant limit on the V-MIL analysis is the absence of primary procurement documentation. The approximately 600-unit MoD delivery figure is from secondary aggregator reporting, not from published IDF tender records. Primary documentation could reveal either a formal Ministry of Defence tender — which would elevate the impact band toward Moderate-High / Knowing Military-Channel Supply — or confirm the civilian leasing characterisation, preserving the current scoring. Without that documentation, the Low / Direct Civilian Supply band is the most defensible assignment, but it is provisional.

A second limit concerns end-user certification. No publicly known Israeli government requirement for EUCs on commercial EV purchases existed at the time of the IDF tender, and no EUC has been identified in connection with this supply. The absence of an EUC requirement is itself analytically significant: it confirms the procurement was treated as a commercial transaction, not a controlled military supply. If China’s Export Control Law had been applied and enforcement proceedings initiated, this would materially change the regulatory picture; no such proceedings have been identified.

The Shlomo Group’s ownership of Israel Shipyards — the builder of Sa’ar 4.5 missile boats and Reshef-class corvettes — is noted in the corporate structure documentation.¹⁵ This creates a structural adjacency within the same commercial group as BYD’s distributor. No BYD technology, component, or revenue flow to Israel Shipyards has been identified, and no indirect BYD contribution to naval defence production is established by available evidence. It is retained as a noted structural fact, not scored as direct involvement.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

V-DIG: Digital

Mechanism of Involvement

BYD’s digital domain exposure to Israeli-origin technology is defined by two confirmed direct procurement relationships with Israeli companies, both of which involve BYD as the buyer rather than the seller of technology. This distinction is scoring-critical: the BDS-1000 Customer Cap places a ceiling of I = 3.9 on configurations where the subject entity purchases rather than provides technology.

The first and most clearly documented relationship is BYD’s selection of Karamba Security and its VCode platform, announced in June 2024.⁹ Karamba Security is an Israeli cybersecurity company headquartered in Hod HaSharon, founded by alumni with backgrounds in Israeli intelligence and defence technology. VCode performs automated static analysis of compiled ECU firmware binaries, generating Software Bills of Materials and identifying embedded vulnerabilities without access to source code. BYD’s driver for this deployment is compliance with UN Regulation No. 155 (UN R155), the mandatory cybersecurity type-approval requirement for vehicle sales in the EU, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and other UNECE contracting states. Because UN R155 compliance is a prerequisite for vehicle sales in BYD’s most important export markets, VCode is embedded directly in BYD’s vehicle development and regulatory certification lifecycle — making this a compliance-critical dependency, not a peripheral procurement.

The second relationship is BYD’s confirmed status as one of the top-10 automakers to adopt Mobileye Surround ADAS.¹⁸ Mobileye is an Israeli-founded company, established in Jerusalem in 1999 and now a publicly listed Intel subsidiary with the majority of its R&D workforce retained in Israel. Mobileye’s EyeQ processor family and SuperVision perception stack support lane-keeping, automatic emergency braking, pedestrian detection, and other ADAS functions that BYD has used in part to satisfy Euro NCAP active safety assessments. The current operational status of this partnership — active versus wound down for new model programmes as BYD develops its proprietary DiPilot / “God’s Eye” ADAS platform — is not definitively resolved by available evidence. BYD has been transitioning compute to Horizon Robotics (Chinese) on newer domestic-market programmes, but no confirmed termination of the Mobileye relationship for export-market SKUs has been identified.

The proximity scores for both relationships are elevated because both are direct B2B contracts: BYD is the named contracting party in the Karamba announcement, and BYD is named as a Mobileye Surround top-10 automaker in Mobileye’s own communications. These are not distributor-mediated or inferred relationships; they are confirmed direct commercial engagements between BYD and Israeli-origin technology vendors.

A third potential relationship — Valens Semiconductor’s announcement of a “4th VA7000 MIPI A-PHY design win with a premium carmaker serving the Chinese market” — was assessed but not confirmed as involving BYD. Valens did not name BYD in its public announcement, and other Chinese premium EV OEMs are plausible candidates.¹⁹ This finding is retained as plausible-but-unconfirmed and excluded from scored evidence.

The directional framing of BYD’s digital domain exposure is important. The 2024 Israeli Ministry of Defence and Shin Bet assessment concerns BYD’s products as a potential Chinese surveillance risk to Israel — specifically, the concern that BYD vehicles transmit location data, audio, and visual information to servers in China.²⁰ This is an Israeli government security determination about Chinese technology in Israel, not evidence of BYD providing technology to Israeli state entities. The IDF officer vehicle ban flows from this assessment and has not been reversed.

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

The Customer Cap is the dominant analytical constraint in this domain, and it operates in BYD’s favour relative to higher-scoring configurations. If BYD were found to have sold or licensed technology to Israeli state or security entities — rather than purchased technology from Israeli vendors — the impact band would shift dramatically upward. No such provision relationship has been identified.

The Mobileye status uncertainty represents the primary residual scoring risk. If the Mobileye Surround relationship is ongoing across export-model programmes, it embeds Israeli-origin ADAS compute across BYD’s European fleet. If it has been wound down for all new programmes, the digital domain narrows to the Karamba relationship alone, which would reduce both I-DIG and M-DIG modestly without breaking the Customer Cap ceiling.

The Project Nimbus adjacency — BYD uses Google Cloud, which holds a ~$1.2 billion Israeli government cloud contract — was explicitly assessed and excluded from scored evidence.²¹ BYD is not a party to Project Nimbus and does not provide services to the Israeli government through that channel. Shared hyperscaler infrastructure creates an adjacency, not a participation. No BYD data centre presence in Israel has been identified. The category error of attributing Shlomo Group’s Check Point IT deployment to BYD was identified and corrected; no Israeli-origin enterprise IT relationships within BYD’s corporate environment have been confirmed.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

V-ECON: Economic

Mechanism of Involvement

BYD’s economic relationship with Israel is characterised by sustained transactional trade mediated through an exclusive national distributor, with no confirmed foreign direct investment, R&D presence, or equity stake in any Israeli entity. This characterisation governs the impact scoring: BYD is a foreign exporter maintaining recurring revenue streams across two product categories — passenger EVs and electric buses — without the deeper integration markers (factories, data centres, joint ventures, direct Israeli employment) that would elevate the impact band.

The passenger vehicle distribution relationship, formalised in August 2022, appointed Shlomo Motors Ltd. as exclusive importer and national distributor.⁶ Shlomo Motors operates retail and service locations in Petach Tikva, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Be’er Sheva.²² Under this structure, Shlomo Motors is the importer of record, assumes VAT and purchase tax obligations, and interfaces with Israeli regulatory authorities. Revenue flows from Israeli consumers to Shlomo Motors (which retains the distributor margin) and then wholesale vehicle prices flow to BYD in China. BYD has no confirmed direct Israeli tax registration or liability; Israeli purchase tax and VAT accrue to Shlomo Motors.

The scale of this trade relationship is well-documented. BYD ranked #1 EV brand in Israel in November 2022 with 2,333 units in a single month.²³ In January–October 2025 it ranked #1 among Chinese OEMs and #6 overall across all OEMs with approximately 12,160 cumulative units.²⁴ A new hybrid model was launched in Israel in November 2025, confirming continued strategic investment in the market.²⁵ January 2026 data placed BYD second in monthly EV sales with 563 units,¹³ demonstrating that the January 2026 military ban — which affects only IDF base operations — had no material impact on civilian market activity.

The electric bus segment is the more strategically significant component of BYD’s Israeli economic footprint. BYD is the confirmed dominant supplier across multiple consecutive tender rounds: 17 buses for Egged in Haifa (2017), 7 for Jerusalem (2018), 10 for Jerusalem Route 15/Talpiot (2019), and the landmark 100-bus tender in 2021.⁵ Israel’s government set targets for zero-emission bus procurement for public transport,²⁶ and BYD’s position as the dominant incumbent supplier means its economic relationship with Israeli public transit is structural rather than purely transactional. Egged’s network serves settlement routes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem,¹⁷ and while the specific assignment of BYD chassis to individual routes is not confirmed, fleet fungibility means BYD units cannot be excluded from settlement-serving operations.

BYD’s confirmed status as a Mobileye Surround top-10 customer adds an outward capital flow dimension: BYD pays licensing or procurement fees to an Israeli-domiciled technology firm (Mobileye Global Inc., Intel subsidiary).¹⁸ The financial quantum is not publicly disclosed, but the structural relationship means BYD is both receiving revenue from Israeli consumers and remitting technology expenditure to an Israeli-origin firm.

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

The primary evidentiary gap in the economic domain concerns Industrial Cooperation Authority (ICA) offset obligations. Under Israeli procurement law, foreign companies winning government procurement contracts above approximately USD 5 million typically commit to reciprocal procurement or investment in Israel at 20–35% of contract value.²⁷ The 100-bus Egged tender is consistent with the scale at which ICA obligations would attach. If confirmed, ICA obligations would require BYD (or Shlomo Motors on its behalf) to direct capital back into the Israeli economy — a structured inward investment flow from BYD’s commercial revenues. The specific dollar quantum cited in prior analysis is unverified and is not reproduced here.

The distributor-mediated structure caps proximity to the Low (Upper End) band despite the scale of commercial activity. BYD employs no staff directly in Israel; Israeli employment contributions from BYD-related activity are entirely Shlomo Motors headcount. No BYD-owned physical assets have been confirmed in Israel or the occupied territories. This structural distance is genuine and represents the strongest counter-argument to elevated proximity scoring: BYD’s departure from the Israeli market would require Shlomo Motors to find alternative brands, but BYD itself has no sunk infrastructure to abandon.

Whether Shlomo Motors operates showrooms or service centres in Israeli settlements in the West Bank — a question that would elevate the territorial character of the economic relationship — is documented in NGO sources including Who Profits but has not been independently confirmed at specific-URL level from training data.¹⁶

Named Entities and Evidence Map

V-POL: Political

Mechanism of Involvement

BYD’s political domain profile is defined primarily by what the company has not done, rather than by documented political acts. BYD has issued no corporate statement on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, or the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza. No press release, CEO letter, earnings-call commentary, or verified social media post on any of these subjects has been identified.²⁸ BYD’s published Human Rights Policy Statement commits the company to internationally recognised human rights frameworks but makes no reference to specific geopolitical conflicts, occupied territories, or international humanitarian law instruments, and provides no mechanism for reviewing operations in contested markets.²⁹

This silence is consistent with BYD’s behaviour on comparable situations. No BYD corporate statement on the Russia-Ukraine war has been identified either, notwithstanding reporting that BYD vehicles continued reaching Russian buyers through third-country intermediaries following the 2022 invasion. The pattern reflects alignment with PRC official posture — the Chinese government’s formal position of neutrality on the Israel-Palestine conflict — rather than an independent corporate stance. Al Jazeera’s October 2023 reporting documented that multinational corporations, especially non-Western ones, largely declined to comment on the conflict; BYD’s silence is not anomalous within its peer cohort.³⁰

All official BYD communications about Israel are framed in commercial and sustainability terms: “landmark electric bus order,” “green transportation” goals, and market-share leadership.⁵³¹ Wang Chuanfu’s documented public statements through the audit period focus exclusively on EV price competition, charging infrastructure, production capacity, and battery technology.³² No political characterisation of BYD’s Israel operations has appeared in any direction.

Wang Chuanfu made a visit to Israel, hosted by Shlomo Motors and reported by the Israeli financial daily Globes.³³ The visit is assessed as pre-dating the October 7, 2023 attacks and is consistent with the pattern of senior Chinese automotive executives visiting key distribution markets. No post-October 7 engagement between Wang Chuanfu and Israeli officials or business counterparts has been confirmed.

The Shlomo Group political adjacency is the most complex element of the V-POL analysis. Affinity Partners — the investment firm established by Jared Kushner following his departure from the White House — invested approximately $150 million into Shlomo Group’s automotive and credit operations, as reported by Globes.³⁴ BYD is the primary international brand in Shlomo Motors’ passenger vehicle portfolio. The structural relationship is: BYD → Shlomo Motors (exclusive distributor) ← Shlomo Group (parent) ← Affinity Partners (investor). This is a chain of three commercial relationships without a confirmed direct BYD–Affinity Partners link, governance overlap, or contractual nexus. No evidence establishes that Affinity Partners holds any governance, operational, or contractual role over Shlomo Motors’ BYD franchise specifically. The connection is structural-inferential rather than documented-direct.

No organised BDS campaign specifically naming BYD as a primary target has been identified as of the audit date. The BDS Movement’s campaign materials do not list BYD alongside named primary targets such as Caterpillar, Elbit Systems, or Hewlett Packard.³⁵ No institutional divestment decision by any pension fund, endowment, or public investment vehicle specifically citing BYD’s Israel operations has been identified. No regulatory inquiry, export control action, or sanctions-related investigation involving BYD’s technology sales or services to Israeli state entities has been identified.

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

The V-POL Exclusive Partner Political Acts rubric requires careful consideration. The rubric’s special elevated-impact trigger would apply if Shlomo Motors (as BYD’s exclusive distributor) were documented as receiving Israeli state honours or making donations to military-welfare or political organisations. No confirmed instance of Shlomo Motors specifically — as distinct from the broader Shlomo Group or its Afcon Holdings subsidiary — making such donations or receiving such honours was identified. The Afcon Holdings subsidiary has separate documented relationships with Israeli security infrastructure (checkpoint systems, detention facility perimeter security),¹⁶ but these are Afcon acts, not Shlomo Motors acts, and the structural distance matters for the rubric trigger. If Who Profits or another documented source were to confirm Shlomo Motors specifically in this role, the V-POL score would increase materially.

A second significant limit concerns the OHCHR database. The September 2025 update to the OHCHR database of businesses with activities in Israeli settlements falls at the outer edge of the training data window, and BYD’s listing status in that update cannot be confirmed with reliability. If BYD were named in the OHCHR database — either directly or through confirmed settlement-serving operations — the political domain characterisation would change substantially, both as a legal-reputational matter and as a trigger for the V-POL campaign and advocacy sub-criteria.

The prior AI research attribution of a “BYD-Mobileye SuperVision” autonomous driving partnership to BYD was a material factual error corrected in the audit: the confirmed Mobileye SuperVision integration is with Zeekr (Geely), a separate OEM.³⁶ This correction reduces the digital-political nexus. A BYD–Nvidia (DRIVE Thor) partnership has been reported at medium confidence; Nvidia’s substantial Israeli R&D infrastructure through its Mellanox heritage is a structural fact about Nvidia, not evidence of a BYD-Israel operational relationship.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

Cross-Domain Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

Across all four domains, the most significant structural limit is the exclusive distributor mediation. Shlomo Motors is the Israeli legal entity that contracts with Israeli market actors; BYD is one step removed from every Israeli market relationship. This creates genuine analytical difficulty: it is the correct characterisation of BYD’s Israeli footprint, but it also means that the most politically and legally sensitive acts in the Shlomo Group ecosystem — Afcon’s checkpoint and detention facility contracts, Shlomo Sixt’s IDF fleet leasing, the Affinity Partners investment — are owned by corporate siblings rather than by BYD directly. Readers should be attentive to the risk of over-attributing these acts to BYD simply because they share a conglomerate parent with BYD’s exclusive distributor.

The January 2026 IDF ban deserves careful reading across domains. It confirms that BYD vehicles entered military operational custody (supporting V-MIL and V-ECON scored evidence) but frames BYD as a Chinese surveillance risk rather than as an Israeli military supplier (relevant to the directional framing in V-DIG). The ban was a unilateral Israeli government security decision; BYD took no voluntary action and made no public statement. The ban’s confirmation that prior military entry occurred via civilian commercial channels is consistent with the Low / Direct Civilian Supply band and the distributor-mediated proximity discount applied in the scoring.

The LFP cell supply hypothesis — a prior claim that BYD “almost certainly” supplies lithium iron phosphate cells to Israeli military battery integrators Epsilor and Amicell — was assessed and discarded. It is an inference from global LFP market share, unsupported by any invoice, procurement contract, corporate filing, or named source. Its exclusion is a material editorial decision: inclusion would have elevated V-MIL significantly. Readers who wish to assess the hypothesis independently should note that it cannot be confirmed from publicly available evidence as of the audit date.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

BDS-1000 Score

Tier: D (200–399)

V-ECON is the highest-scoring domain (V_MAX = 2.55), driven by confirmed significant-scale sustained trade: #6 overall OEM in Israel for January–October 2025, dominant multi-round eBus supplier, and active product launches through late 2025. The Low (Upper End) — Indirect but Meaningful / Key Distributor proximity band (P = 5.50) correctly reflects that all activity flows through Shlomo Motors, not through direct BYD operational presence.

V-DIG scores the highest proximity (P = 8.00) because BYD is the named contracting party in direct B2B agreements with Karamba Security and Mobileye — no distributor intervenes in these technology relationships. The Customer Cap (I ceiling = 3.9) is the binding constraint: BYD is a buyer of Israeli-origin technology, not a provider. This is the most internally constrained domain in the scoring.

V-MIL is suppressed by the civilian procurement channel (Low / Direct Civilian Supply, I = 2.50) and the operative IDF ban, which limits present-tense magnitude. Proximity (P = 5.50) reflects the distributor-mediated structure: Shlomo Sixt was the IDF contracting entity; BYD is one step removed.

V-POL records the lowest score (0.41) on the strength of confirmed absences: no advocacy, no donations, no lobbying, and no documented exclusive-partner political acts by Shlomo Motors that would trigger the special elevated-impact rule.

The composite formula weights V_MAX at full value and other domain scores at 20%, producing BRS = ((2.55 + 0.76) / 16) × 1000 = 207.

Confidence, Limits, and Open Questions

High confidence findings: BYD’s appointment of Shlomo Motors as exclusive distributor (2022); electric bus tender wins and delivery volumes (2017–2021); passenger vehicle market share data (2022–2026); Karamba Security VCode partnership (June 2024); Mobileye Surround top-10 status; corporate silence on Gaza; January 2026 IDF ban; Affinity Partners investment in Shlomo Group.

Medium confidence findings: Approximately 600-unit MoD delivery figure (secondary aggregator, no primary IDF documentation); Wang Chuanfu Israel visit timing and agenda; Mobileye partnership active status for export-model programmes; specific BYD chassis assignments on Egged settlement-serving routes.

Low confidence / open questions:

• Whether BYD appears in the September 2025 OHCHR settlement database update
• Whether ICA offset obligations were triggered by eBus tenders and their quantum
• Whether Shlomo Motors specifically (not Afcon Holdings) has received Israeli state honours or made military-welfare donations
• Whether Valens Semiconductor’s unnamed Chinese OEM customer is BYD
• Whether Shlomo Sixt operates branches in West Bank settlements
• Whether the BYD–Shlomo Motors arrangement involves any equity component

Score sensitivity: The 207 score would increase materially if: (a) primary IDF documentation confirmed a formal Ministry of Defence tender (V-MIL I-band shift to Moderate-High); (b) Mobileye Surround relationship confirmed ongoing for new export programmes; (c) Shlomo Motors documented as making FIDF-type donations or receiving state honours (V-POL special rule trigger); or (d) BYD confirmed in the OHCHR settlement database.

Recommended Actions

For institutional investors and procurement screeners (Tier D — apply enhanced due diligence): The score of 207 places BYD in Tier D, indicating a meaningful but predominantly indirect Israel exposure profile. Enhanced due diligence is warranted rather than automatic exclusion. Specifically: request confirmation from BYD investor relations on the current status of the Mobileye Surround partnership for export programmes; monitor BYD’s response (or continued silence) to the January 2026 IDF ban; and track any OHCHR database update naming BYD.

For supply chain compliance teams: The Karamba Security VCode integration is confirmed compliance-critical for UN R155 certification across UNECE markets. Procurement governance should document this as a confirmed Israeli-origin vendor dependency. The Mobileye ADAS relationship should be confirmed as active or wound-down for new model programmes in current-year supplier due diligence cycles.

For ESG analysts: BYD’s Human Rights Policy Statement provides no conflict-specific review mechanism.²⁹ Engagement letters should request: (a) a statement on BYD’s approach to distributor-mediated operations in contested territories; (b) clarification of ICA offset obligations arising from Israeli government bus tenders; and (c) disclosure of any post-January 2026 communications between BYD and Shlomo Motors regarding the military ban.

For civil society researchers: The primary evidentiary gap constraining V-MIL is the absence of primary IDF tender documentation. Access to IDF Technology and Logistics Directorate procurement records, or to Israeli Accountant General GVA tender files, would resolve the civilian-leasing versus formal-MoD-tender question. Route-level fleet assignment records from Egged would resolve the settlement-serving bus question. A live search of the OHCHR settlement database and Who Profits database against BYD and Shlomo Motors would resolve the low-confidence OHCHR finding.

For BYD’s own governance: The January 2026 IDF ban reveals an absence of any corporate governance mechanism for monitoring commercial vehicles entering military use through third-party distributors. A distributor end-use monitoring policy — including provisions for civilian-to-military channel leakage — would be consistent with BYD’s stated human rights framework and with OECD due diligence guidance for the automotive sector.

End Notes