China's BYD Feb sales fall sharply, shares down

* BYD Feb car sales down 49 percent from January

* Sales down 22 percent year on year - reports

* Shares lose as much as 4.7 pct after sales data

Chinese car maker BYD Co Ltd (1211.HK), backed by U.S. billionaire Warren Buffett, said itsFebruary vehicle sales fell by nearly half from January, pushing its shares down as much as 4.7 percent on Friday.

The battery and car maker said it sold 26,521 vehicles in February, down by about half from January, partly because of the week-long Lunar New Year holiday. The number was 49 percent below its January sales of 52,054 vehicles.

Analysts said BYD's best-selling low-end models, the F0 and F3, were losing competitiveness and mid- to high-end models were not gaining sales momentum.

BYD's February car sales volume dropped 22 percent from 34,184 units in February last year at the wholesale level, media reports quoted the company as saying.

"The company is still struggling on the conventional vehicle side," said Jack Yeung, an auto analyst at BNP Paribas. "What weneed to see is how the company is trying to change its strategygoing forward."

Last month, BYD slashed the prices of five models by up to a fifth, aiming to bolster weak sales.

Its shares fell to a session low of HK$33.35 at 0726 GMT onFriday after the February sales figure, underperforming the HangSeng Index's .HSI 1.2 percent gain.

The stock had surged about 15 percent in the past two days onoptimism that it would benefit after Beijing announced a new energy car 10-year plan to debut this year. However, because of a lack of standardised specifications fornew energy vehicles and charging station components, analystsgenerally do not expect a rise in demand from the private sectorin the near term. "I am optimistic for the long term, but in the near term there is concern over how they can turn around their conventional vehicle sales," Yeung said.

(Reporting by Alison Leung; Editing by Chris Lewis)