Yahoo Autos These Are the World's Biggest Battery Manufacturers for EVs
Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., better known as CATL, is poised to remain the largest global seller of batteries for electric and hybrid cars in 2022. The Chinese company sold roughly 70.9 gigawatt hours worth of batteries through the first half of 2022, marking a 115.6 percent increase in sales relative to the same period the year before, according to South Korea’s SNE Research.
Established in 2011, CATL quickly entered into a strategic partnership with BMW. Since then, the company with a market cap of nearly $1.3 trillion (as of this writing) has entered joint-venture business arrangements with Chinese vehicle manufacturers such as SAIC Motor, Dongfeng Motor, GAC Group, Geely Auto Group, and FAW Group. CATL also supplies battery components to Tesla for vehicles built at the automaker’s Shanghai plant.
Electric Car Growth
The popularity of battery-electric vehicles continues to grow in China, with BEVs accounting for nearly 20 percent of overall passenger-car sales through the first half of 2022, per the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. In fact, more than double the amount of battery-electric passenger cars have been sold in China through June 2022 than during the same period the year prior. Plug-in-hybrid vehicle sales in China, meanwhile, are up more than 150 percent compared to the first half of 2021. No surprise, then, that a Chinese battery company is seeing such dominance in the automotive industry.
Despite its size, CATL does not have a single battery production facility in the United States. That said, this is expected to change in the coming years, as the company is rumored to be announcing plans to build a battery factory in America in the coming months.
Other Top EV Battery Manufacturers
Though Americans are adopting battery-powered vehicles at a slower rate than Chinese consumers, our appetite for electric and battery-electric cars still continues to grow. It certainly accounts for some of LG Energy Solution's sales success, as the South Korean company supplies battery components to the likes of Lucid, Porsche, and Tesla. Credit the latter automaker for much of LG Energy Solution's growth, as booming sales of the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y in Europe and China helped the South Korean company move its batteries into Tesla buyers' driveways and garages.
LG Energy Solution is also a key stakeholder in Ultium Cells, a joint venture between it and General Motors with a finished factory in Warren, Ohio. Additionally, factories in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and Lansing, Michigan, are underway. Ultium batteries currently power the likes of the GMC Hummer EV and Cadillac Lyriq.
