BYD sold 44% of its units overseas and booked more than half its revenue there. I tried to work out how much of that gap is actually mix.

BYD's interim landed after Friday's close on 28 August. Revenue RMB 344.82bn, down 7.13%, net profit attributable RMB 12.33bn, down 20.54%. Overseas took 792,256 of 1,808,511 vehicles in the half, 44% of units, but RMB 181.27bn of revenue against RMB 163.55bn in Greater China. Fewer than half the cars, more than half the money.

That is RMB 229,000 per overseas vehicle against RMB 161,000 at home, and I do not trust the gap. Group revenue also carries the electronics business, RMB 69.41bn, reported with no regional split. Push all of it into the overseas column as the extreme case and revenue per car abroad falls to RMB 141,000, below domestic.

Margin is the cleaner read. The filing puts overseas gross margin at 21.71% against 15.67% for Greater China, which is down 1.30 points, with the group at 18.85%.

Q2 net profit was RMB 8.2bn, up 30%, the first increase in five quarters. The 8.2bn edged past the RMB 8bn average in a Bloomberg survey, but Morgan Stanley, UBS, Citi, Deutsche Bank and CMBI had been nearer a 48% profit gain, and the H shares fell 5.2% in Hong Kong on Monday 31 August, so whatever that export margin is worth, a fair amount of it was already in the price. What I cannot judge is whether the overseas margin holds once those newer markets fill with competitors.

KWEB is built around internet names, so an automaker never enters an index drawn that way. In CNQQ the BYD line was 1.64% on 31 August, fourteenth of 106 holdings, and that index reruns selection only twice a year, so a half like this moves the weight through the share price and not through the index until the next review.