In late 2019, residents of Arnstadt, central Germany woke up and found that diggers were breaking ground on the outskirts of the town, located at the site of an abandoned solar panel manufacturing plant. The $2 billion project covers nearly 57 acres and covers about 100 football fields. It is Germany's first large battery factory and can provide enough batteries for hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles each year.
Germany invented the four-stroke internal combustion engine in 1876. Its automobile industry provided impetus for the economic development of Germany after the war. Brands such as BMW , Mercedes-Benz and Audi have become the most professional symbols of reliability and automotive engineering. But the Arnstadt factory was not built by a German automaker. Instead, it was built at a famous battery manufacturer established by the mountainous Ningde in eastern Fujian Province, China. The company is called Ningde . According to information checked online by Guagejia Finance, CATL has reached an agreement with Volkswagen and BMW to supply batteries to Volkswagen and BMW, because automakers are seeking to transform themselves and get rid of internal combustion engines. CATL also agreed to provide batteries for electric buses and trucks of Daimler .
In order to achieve the climate change target of EU , German automakers must reduce their carbon emissions from cars starting from 2020, otherwise they will face huge fines from Brussels . So starting in 2019, before the new policy came into effect, automakers such as Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz manufacturer Daimler began to make a significant increase in the number of electric vehicles they will produce.
battery is the most expensive part of electric vehicles (EVs), and expanding battery production is crucial to the success of electric vehicles in the mass market. However, European automakers have neither local battery production nor have a place in the wider battery supply chain. Meanwhile, CATL is building a factory in Germany, and Tesla is negotiating to build a gigabit factory outside Berlin . German automakers had no choice but to visit China with a checkbook, acquire Guoxuan Hi-Tech and cooperate with CATL to purchase batteries in batches, and invest a large amount of stake in Chinese battery companies.
German officials also said: "Our competitors are headquartered in South Korea and China." This is a reversal of Europe's fate. Germany was once a supplier of China's advanced manufacturing , but now China has moved upstream to the value chain. By 2022, CATL will serve nearly all electric car manufacturers in the world, including Tesla and Ford, giving the company the dominant position in its transformation away from fossil fuels.
How did a Chinese company that few people have heard of beat the German automaker in the game?
CATL is located on the edge of Ningde, not far from the pond where fish is raised. In order to serve the workers of the factory, there is a street in this large factory, where there are cheap noodle shops and auto repair shops frequently visited by migrant workers. In the factory, the battery components move silently on the automatic conveyor belt.
In the 1990s, a typical representative of factories in China's earliest cities was the army of migrant workers. It was also at that time that a young man named Zeng Yuqun came from Fujian to Guangdong and came to the coastal city of Dongguan near Hong Kong. At that time, Dongguan and Shenzhen were important manufacturing areas, with a large number of factories and small workshops, a large number of migrant workers, and a large number of technical personnel.
For an ambitious young man, Zeng Yuqun's arrival in Dongguan was like going to the center of the world, a place connected to the global supply chain, where workers lived in crowded dormitories and could watch TV programs in Hong Kong. Hong Kong had not returned yet, so they watched TV secretly.It was not long before it opened, so Dongguan was still farmland and rice fields. The local area encouraged foreign investors to invest in manufacturing. Later, Dongguan attracted a large number of Taiwanese, Hong Kong and foreign investors to invest in factories and attracted a large number of migrant workers from all over China. Dongguan was once a border town. For a long time, it was an area full of factories and a pornographic service industry chain in the Pearl River Delta. People from all over the world took the green train to Dongguan to work in the factory or wholesale clothing. At night, the streets were filled with young workers completing shifts, full of hope and dreams.
Zeng Yuqun was born in Lankou Village, Ningde, Fujian in 1968. He is an ordinary farmer. He was born smart and graduated from , Ningde No. 1 Middle School in Fujian Province at the age of 17, and was admitted to the Department of Ship Engineering of Shanghai Jiaotong University. Later, he obtained a master's degree in the Department of Electronics and Information Engineering of South China University of Technology and a doctorate in the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. After graduation, he was assigned to a state-owned enterprise in Fujian. However, like many legendary entrepreneurs, Zeng Yuqun also had restless factors in his bones. He could have lived a comfortable life like an iron rice bowl, because working in a state-owned enterprise was well known and the job would make his parents proud. But Zeng Yuqun was not satisfied with the day he saw the head at a glance, so he resolutely left.
Zeng Yuqun stayed in Dongguan for 10 years and later became the only director of SAE Magnetic in mainland China. During this period, he also began to learn about batteries, and by the late 1990s, the CEO of Xinke Magnetic Power Plant persuaded Zeng Yuqun to start a battery company.
1999, Zeng Yuqun created ATL (New Energy Technology Co., Ltd.), and promoted ATL to a new development and to produce batteries for mobile phones. This is a good time: mobile phone sales are growing significantly, and many people are starting to connect to the internet, which requires more portable power supplies. The boom of lithium batteries has begun, and Dongguan quickly became the center of production of mobile phones, chargers and accessories.
However, at the beginning of its establishment, ATL had almost no intellectual property rights or any breakthrough technology. Zeng Yuqun and his colleagues spent $1 million to buy Bell's patent license for lithium batteries from the United States, but when they returned home, they found that making the technology work was not as easy as they thought, and the finished product had the risk of explosion and it was difficult to mass produce. Faced with such a problem, the patent inventor said that there is no suitable solution.
When they struggle in Dongguan, they worry that it might mean the newly formed company will go bankrupt. They spent two weeks working overtime to overcome difficulties by trying different electrolyte combinations. Finally, they successfully overcome technical problems and found a way to reduce product costs. Zeng Yuqun later repeated this model for electric vehicle battery for production. ATL managed to produce batteries at half the cost than South Korean competitors, and their lithium polymer battery is also thinner than other models of batteries, which can be adjusted to the shape of the device, and the company ended up making profits within three months of battery production.
Since Sony commercialized the first lithium-ion battery in 1991, this is the beginning of China's entry into the battery industry, which has been dominated by Japan. The battery revolution in China is progressing slowly, and the first lithium battery was developed at the Institute of Physics in 1995. By 2000, Japan still accounted for 90% of the world's annual lithium-ion battery production, with 500 million batteries, while China's annual production was only 35 million. However, by 2001, ATL shipped more than 1 million batteries of Bluetooth headsets and portable DVD player. In the same year, China joined the World Trade Organization , which opened China to a large number of foreign investment.
ATL helped China become a high-value battery manufacturer. Apple 's Jobs also faced the battery life of the iPad at that time. In the end, Zeng Yuqun successfully solved the battery life of the tablet for Jobs. The iPad's battery life can now last more than 10 hours, which was solved by Zeng Yuqun. The later Apple series of computers still use Zeng Yuqun's original battery technology until the current 14 series.After Zeng Yuqun solved the battery problem for Apple, he became a global figure, which also laid the foreshadowing for him to make CATL's automotive batteries later. The article later was written in detail.
In 2011, Zeng Yuqun decided to get involved in automotive batteries and launch CATL. As of 2017, Zeng Yuqun's CATL had surpassed Panasonic and became the world's largest lithium-ion battery manufacturer. By expanding production scale, Zeng Yuqun successfully reduced production costs compared with its competitors in South Korea and Japan. German automakers have no choice but to rely on China to ensure the safety of their electric vehicle batteries. Volkswagen has also acquired Guoxuan Hi-Tech Battery Company, one of the world's top five, and will also list the company in Europe this year and build a battery production factory in Europe. CATL also began to acquire crazy mergers and acquisitions in the upstream and downstream of batteries, acquiring a large number of lithium ore , and donating huge sums of money to establish R&D cooperation for Shanghai universities.
is not just a German car company. Zeng Yuqun provides batteries for many Chinese start-ups, such as Ideal and Xiaopeng . These companies are listed on U.S. Stock Exchange and have begun to export cars to Europe, adding another layer of competition to German companies. MG, a British automobile company owned by Chinese state-owned enterprise , SAIC Group , also sold ZS electric vehicles using CATL batteries in the UK. To ensure that it has a stable resource flow, CATL acquired shares in an Australian lithium project, an Indonesian Nickel project and a Congo Cobalt deposit, all of which are basic components of the battery. CATL has also laid out the energy storage field and established a cooperative relationship with Sungrow Power Supply , the world's leading photovoltaic inverter, , to enter the energy storage field.
According to the 2022 global wealth list, by 2022, Zeng Yuqun, with a round face and short figure, has a net worth of US$34.3 billion, becoming the 30th richest person in the world. The company's stock price has risen rapidly since 2019, and then it has also made shareholders who invested in CATL to get rich returns. In the past few years, Zhang Lei , which subscribed to CATL stocks, achieved several times of profit. The Gua Ge family only had 100 yuan when they entered CATL. In recent years, it can be said that the number of billionaires created by CATL has far exceeded Google and Facebook, and its value has exceeded Volkswagen.
In the era of green energy, new energy vehicles and solar power generation are future trends, and the technology coming soon is not the competitiveness of automobile technology but the competitiveness of batteries. In terms of new energy vehicle batteries, China is currently a global leader. Germany, a major automobile country, made a strategic mistake of ignoring battery research and development, which has led to its loss of competitiveness now.
Now maybe there are still people who think that the battery is only used for smartphones and other portable devices, but that's a mistake. The era of new energy vehicles has obviously begun to develop rapidly. BYD has announced that it will not be producing fuel vehicles. The core competition in the era of new energy vehicles is no longer the vehicle itself, but the battery! Whether it is Li, Xiaomi , Xiaopeng, Huawei , NIO or other new energy vehicle brands, it is hard to say who can survive in a few years, but at present, CATL will still be the global battery overlord.
