In April 2022, Chinese battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. announced a blockbuster deal in Indonesia: With local partners, it would spend $6 billion on a complex on North Maluku island that would mine nickel, process it into electrodes and then manufacture electric vehicle batteries. There would even be a factory to recycle defects and production scrap.
Though the project's ambitious scale was highly unusual for the nascent EV battery industry, CATL was just getting started. A week later, the company spent $124 million to acquire a lithium mine in China’s Jiangxi province, an operation that would feed into a $2.1 billion battery factory it was building nearby. And in October, it spent $3.6 billion to buy 25% of a cobalt operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This year, CATL has spent $1 billion on a lithium brine operation in Bolivia, $885 million for lithium rights in China’s Xinjiang province and $920 million for lithium rights in the Chinese province of Sichuan.
For six years, CATL has been the world’s largest producer of EV batteries, producing one of every three EV batteries in the world, twice as many as its closest competitor. But the yearlong metals grab was a brute-force demonstration of an apparent intention to mold the battery world around itself. In striking these deals, CATL is putting together a mine-to-battery empire that echoes Henry Ford’s vertical integration, but for the EV age.
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