The overseas map of 63 Chinese lithium enterprises! - Storage electric home energy storage

Learned: lithium electric industry chain enterprises abroad to expand and promote the pace.

In 2022, Doutop lithium battery factories such as Ningde Times, Guoxuan High-tech, Yi Wei Lithium Energy, Vision Power, Honeycomb Energy, Funeng Technology, China Independent Innovation Aviation and other game players will set up factories in foreign countries with huge amounts of money, bind customers and compete for order information.

According to incomplete statistics from the international Energy Network/Energy Storage Technology, the total production capacity of Chinese power battery enterprises' completed, newly built and overall planned foreign factories has exceeded 300GWh, exceeding the total number of power battery users in the world in 2021. Among them, Ningde Times has 114GWh, Yiwei Lithium Energy 20GWh, Vision Power 157GWh, and Guoxuan Gaoco 20GWh/ Honeycomb Energy 24GWh.

The "foreign production increase tide" of top rechargeable battery enterprises promoted the upper, middle and downstream enterprises to follow one after another, and accelerated the launch of China's lithium electric industry chain.

Energy storage through the North American market

China's power battery exports have been mainly concentrated in Europe, while the North American market is dominated by Japanese and Korean companies. But when it comes to North America, Chinese companies have been poised for success.

In February 2022, Ningde Times held an institutional and investor research activity, in this research activity, the chairman of Ningde Times Zeng Yuqun said, "The American market, Ningde Times must enter."

The company has postponed its plan to build a factory in North America to supply Tesla and Ford. However, Ningde era took a different path and first achieved a breakthrough in the field of energy storage.

In September 2022, Ningde Times entered into a cooperation agreement with FlexGen, a Us-Based energy storage technology company based here, to supply the latter with 10GWh of energy storage products over a three-year period. The energy storage product is container-type liquid-cooled energy storage product EnerC, which is developed for extreme cold, high temperature, high humidity, desert and other extreme weather. FlexGen will help Sunnyside's energy storage products spread to high performance energy storage systems in Texas, California and throughout North America.

Ningde Times also has a number of major energy storage projects deployed in the North American market, including three Southern California Edison projects with a total capacity of more than 2.1GWh, and commercial energy storage projects in operation or under construction in Texas that exceed 500MWh.

Ningde's era was not the only one to shine.

Chinese power battery companies such as BYD, Sunpower, Trina Solar, Kelu Electronics, Narada Power, and Yi Wei Lithium Energy are all accelerating their layout in North America.

Byd was one of the first Chinese companies to start an energy storage business in the United States. Back in 2011, BYD received a 4MWh energy storage order from Chevron, and exported its first container of energy storage battery products overseas, officially knocking on the door of the North American market. In 2014, BYD joined hands with America RES to build the largest energy storage project in North America operated with a pure business model. In 2015 alone, BYD exported a total of 100 containers of 132MW energy storage products to the US energy storage market.

At present, BYD Energy Storage has installed 160,000 household energy storage products in 56 countries around the world.

As one of the earliest photovoltaic enterprises involved in energy storage in China, Solar Power Co., Ltd. has overseas markets for its energy storage system business covering many countries and regions such as the United States, Britain, Germany and Japan.

"North America is one of the important strategic markets for solar power." According to Wang Zihan, general manager of Sunbeam Americas, the company's liquid-cooled energy storage system PowerTitan has been successfully used in Texas, New York and other states.

In outdoor energy storage, a branch of the industry, Chinese enterprises have become the biggest beneficiary of this market boom.

According to public data, the portable energy storage market has grown 23-fold in the past four years, with the U.S. and Japan accounting for more than 75% of sales. In the past two years, Chinese companies have accounted for more than 90% of the world's portable energy storage production.

Building factories overseas has become a trend

As the scale of the overseas market continues to expand, it is no longer the most economical way for domestic batteries to be transported to the overseas market by sea or other means, so it is put on the agenda to build factories overseas.

"Chinese power battery companies generally choose to set up factories in Europe, mainly for the purpose of supporting European car companies nearby, the demand end and the supply end is close to the lowest cost." CAI Jinshu, vice president of Hubei Yiwei Power Co., LTD., previously said publicly.

In addition, in order to protect the local industrial chain and meet the localization requirements, European and American countries stipulate that 65% of the value of the procurement chain of some overseas enterprises needs to be purchased locally, which also means that building factories is the only way to expand the overseas market.

Xu Xingwu, executive vice president of the General Institute of Engineering and Research at Guoxuan, once revealed that Volkswagen cars in Europe must be equipped with batteries made in Europe.

The establishment of overseas factories by power battery enterprises is not only conducive to reducing costs, but also, from the perspective of supply chain security, will help enterprises have more say in the future, which is more conducive to enterprises to participate in international competition.

On March 29, the company announced that it was "buying land in Hungary" to build a cylindrical battery factory;

On June 27, the company announced plans to build a battery production facility in Gottingen, Germany, with an annual capacity of 20GWh. On October 5, its U.S. subsidiary, Gotion, will open a $2.364 billion battery module manufacturing plant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, creating 2,350 jobs and making it the largest economic development project in northern Michigan's history.

Ningder Times announced in April that its first overseas plant in Thuringia, Germany, which is less than 300 kilometers away from Tesla's Gigafactory in Berlin, was officially licensed to produce 8GWh cells.

In September, Ningde Times signed a pre-purchase agreement with Debrecen, Hungary, and officially launched its second factory in Europe, with a total investment of 7.34 billion euros (about 50.9 billion yuan). It is reported that Ningde Times set up a battery factory in Hungary, mainly because of the local industrial support, battery raw materials, diaphragm and other auxiliary materials can be purchased in the surrounding area.

The GDR is released synchronously

GDRS are Global Depositary Receipts, or Global Deposit Receipt. With the continuous improvement of the transaction system, GDR has become an important choice for enterprises to go abroad for financing.

Since the Shanghai-London Stock Connect was expanded to China-Europe Stock Connect in 2022, the locations for A-share listed companies to issue GDRS overseas have expanded from the UK to Switzerland.

In the context of continued strong demand for lithium, in order to promote the internationalization strategy, there have been 12 listed companies in the lithium industry have announced plans to issue GDR, involving lithium batteries, upstream raw materials, anode and cathode materials, diaphragm, electrolyte, equipment and other fields.

There will be more qualified lithium companies follow the pace of overseas GDR issuance.

Solid support for the whole industrial chain

Supporting Chinese companies to reap the "dividend" of this round of global growth in energy storage is their advantage in the lithium industry chain.

Wang Yu, chairman of the company, said in an interview with the media that China has been developing lithium power for many years and has a very complete industrial chain. Europe and North America, to a large extent, still need to rely on China's industrial chain to meet their needs.

In terms of upstream raw materials, Tianqi Lithium, Ganfeng Lithium and other companies have laid out a large number of high-quality lithium, cobalt and nickel resources through acquisition and participation holding. At present, China already has 58% of the world's lithium, 65% of cobalt and 35% of nickel processing, firmly occupying the world's top spot.

In terms of battery materials, China's production capacity accounts for 42% of the positive electrode material, 65% of the negative electrode material, 65% of the electrolyte field and 43% of the diaphragm field. China dominates the manufacturing of all major materials for lithium batteries.

In terms of battery equipment, due to its leading technology and superior performance, Leading Intelligence, Yinghe Technology, Liyuanheng, Hymstar and other head equipment enterprises have received a large number of European orders. Chinese battery equipment has become an important choice for the European power battery industry.

According to the calculation of West China Securities, by 2025, the overall overseas lithium power enterprises will increase the demand for equipment will exceed 50 billion yuan. The precise development of the European market is undoubtedly crucial for battery industry chain enterprises.

The competitive advantage of lithium electric industry chain provides a solid guarantee for Chinese power batteries to continuously reduce cost and increase efficiency and stand on the top of the world.

The drumbeat, however, has only just begun.

Source: International Energy Network/Energy Storage Headlines