Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd., or CATL, already sells the most batteries to the biggest electric-vehicle makers in the biggest EV market: China. Now it wants to use proceeds from a pending initial public offering backed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to get under the hoods of more European marques and secure customers in the U.S.
The company plans to raise 13.1 billion yuan ($2 billion) as soon as this year by selling a 10 percent stake, at a valuation of about $20 billion. The share sale would finance construction of a battery-cell plant second in size only to Tesla Inc.’s Gigafactory in Nevada—big enough to cement China as the leader in the technology replacing gas-guzzling engines.
The new assembly lines would quintuple CATL’s production capability and make it the world’s largest electric-vehicle battery cell manufacturer, ahead of Tesla, Warren Buffett-backed BYD Co. in China, and South Korea’s LG Chem Ltd., according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The factory could go fully online as soon as 2020, an opportune time as China targets a sevenfold increase in new-energy vehicle sales by 2025 and ponders a course for phasing out fossil-fuel vehicles altogether.
“China, unabashedly, wants to be the Detroit of electric vehicles,” said Anthony Milewski, a managing director at Pala Investments Ltd., a Zug, Switzerland-based fund investing in the EV supply chain. “There is no question in my mind that they are going to lead the world in capacity and, eventually, in the technology.”
Read more at The Breakneck Rise of China’s Colossus of Electric-Car Batteries
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