On April 28, 2026, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited — CATL to the automakers and analysts who track it — closed the largest Hong Kong share placement of the year, selling roughly 62.4 million new shares at HK$628.20 each to raise HK$39.2 billion, about $5 billion. The stock slid initially on dilution worries before recovering; CATL's Hong Kong-listed shares have risen more than 150 percent since its secondary listing there in May 2025. The company says the proceeds will fund four things through 2030: overseas manufacturing, next-generation battery chemistry, zero-carbon factories and recycling, and further global expansion — chiefly a plant under construction in Debrecen, Hungary. It is, in miniature, the CATL story of the past three years: raise capital in Asia, build in Europe, and keep expanding into a market its rivals cannot easily follow.
The scale underneath that expansion is difficult to overstate. CATL posted 423.7 billion yuan in revenue for 2025 — roughly $58 billion — up 17 percent year over year, with net profit up 42 percent to 72.2 billion yuan. Its workforce grew from about 132,000 employees at the end of 2024 to nearly 186,000 a year later, a 41 percent jump in twelve months, with 97 percent of staff based in mainland China. The company has held the top spot in global EV battery supply for nine consecutive years running, with 39.2 percent of the world market in 2025 and roughly 40.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026 — more than double the share of its nearest rival, BYD's in-house battery unit. Unlike BYD, which builds batteries mainly for its own cars, CATL sells to nearly everyone: Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Ford and Stellantis are all customers, and CATL and Stellantis are jointly building a €4.1 billion lithium-iron-phosphate battery plant in Zaragoza, Spain, targeted to open by late 2026.
The World's Default Battery Supplier
That customer list is precisely what makes CATL more than a Chinese industrial champion — it is a piece of infrastructure that much of the global auto industry now runs on. BMW is sourcing cylindrical cells from CATL for its coming "Neue Klasse" platform. Volkswagen's China unit signed a battery-technology research agreement with the company. Ford's LFP battery plant in Michigan uses CATL technology under a licensing arrangement rather than a joint venture — a structure built deliberately to route around US restrictions on Chinese-owned battery equity, discussed below. CATL now operates or is building plants in Ningde, Ningde's home province of Fujian, seven other Chinese provinces, Erfurt in Germany, Debrecen in Hungary, and an integrated project in Indonesia expected to begin production around March 2026. Few companies anywhere sit this close to the center of a global industrial supply chain while remaining almost entirely owned and run from one country.
A Chairman's Bet on the Next Chemistry
At a "Tech Day" event on April 21, 2026, CATL said it had resolved the core manufacturing hurdles for sodium-ion batteries — a chemistry that swaps lithium for a cheaper, more abundant element — and would begin mass production this year, with an initial real-world test fleet of 10,000 to 20,000 electric vehicles. Chairman Robin Zeng has told industry audiences that sodium-ion could eventually displace 30 to 40 percent of the existing lithium battery market, and the company followed the Tech Day announcement with plans in May to expand sodium-battery capacity by 40 gigawatt-hours after securing what it called the world's largest sodium-ion order. If that timeline holds, CATL would be moving to displace part of its own lithium business before a competitor forces the issue — an unusual bet for a market leader to make against itself.
CATL's dominance means a battery pack built in Ningde can end up under a Tesla in Texas, a BMW in Munich or a bus in Jakarta — with the same company, and increasingly the same government's trade policy, sitting somewhere upstream of all three.
Washington has responded to that concentration with escalating friction. The US Department of Defense added CATL to its list of alleged Chinese military-linked companies in January 2025, a designation CATL disputes and that bars it from Pentagon contracts. Separately, under the Inflation Reduction Act's "Foreign Entity of Concern" rules — tightened further by 2025 budget-reconciliation legislation — EV components or materials tied to Chinese firms like CATL risk making vehicles ineligible for US consumer tax credits, with domestic-content thresholds phasing in from 2026. CATL's response has been structural rather than defiant: the Ford Michigan deal licenses technology and equipment to a wholly US-owned plant instead of taking an equity stake, a workaround explicitly designed to survive the new rules. It is a sign of how central CATL has become to the American EV supply chain that automakers are engineering around US policy to keep using its technology, rather than simply switching suppliers.
The harder problem may be at home. Chinese battery manufacturers have built capacity that industry estimates put at roughly four times current global demand, spread across nearly fifty domestic producers — a mismatch that points toward a consolidation wave CATL, as the dominant player, is best positioned to survive and worst positioned to avoid entirely. Competition with BYD is intensifying specifically around fast-charging technology, with both companies racing toward battery packs that can add hundreds of kilometers of range in minutes. None of that changes CATL's position at the top of the market this year, but it does mean the company's next major test may not be Washington's blacklist — which it has so far absorbed through clever contract structuring — but a domestic price war among battery makers chasing a market that has already been won.