Many years ago, I sent a staff to China to present a paper on incubation park in a Malaysian university. We were proud that we have established a 20-acre incubation park, where start-ups and university spin-offs could operate. When he came back, he reported what the Chinese had established an incubation park in a university in Northeast China.
The size of the incubation park was more than 500 acres, compared to ours of only 20 acres. It is not surprising that factories in China often occupy huge areas due to their big domestic market as well as overseas markets. Many of the factories are owned by quite and unknown business giants.
One such giant is Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited or CATL. The company, by far, is the largest battery-maker in the world. Its batteries power a third of the world’s electric vehicles EVs) and a similar share of energy-storage systems (ESSs).
According to SNE Research, in 2024, CATL shipped 491 GWh of batteries for EVs and ESSs. This represents about 38 per cent of the EVs and ESSs markets of 1,299 GWh. The second position is occupied by BYD, with 192 GWh. BYD uses its batteries to power its own EVs. This is closely followed by LGES, a Korean company.
CATLs’ operations are based in Ningde, a town in Southeast of China. The rise of the company, founded in 2011, changed the economic fortune of Ningde, which was the hometown of its founder ,Robin Zeng. In fact, the economic output of Ningde is bigger than Estonia or Uganda.
CATL is now a public company . It just completed a secondary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, raising more than US$5 billion in the process. The shares are already listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange since 2018.
CATL is the giant of its industry. Its manufacturing sites in China occupy 20 million square meters, and employ about 100,000 people, as well as own lithium mines. Its scale and vertical integration have allowed it to reduce costs and lowered prices for its batteries. In 2024, it earned a revenue of US$50 billion. It is now expanding its factories overseas. Its customers include all the Chinese EVs firms (except BYD), BMW, Toyota and Volkswagen. It supplies ESSs to many projects, including the world’s biggest energy-storage project in UAE.
CATL is continuously advancing its battery technology with R&D spending in research and development amounting to US$2.5 billion in 2024, which was much bigger than the total R&D expenditure of its competitors. . In April 2025, it unveiled a battery that can provide 520 km of driving with 5 minutes of charging, as compared to BYD’s 400 km battery with the same charging time.
The rise of CATL shows the dominance of China in EVs and ESSs. The company is one of the many Chinse companies which dominate specific sectors of the world’s technology. In recent years, these firms have quietly gained technological advantages and exporting their products overseas. They are often located in smaller cities, other than Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing.
Economic analysts have pointed out that the actual GDP of China does not reflect the economic power of these unknown dominant companies. They serve both the large Chinese domestic market as well as the growing markets in Southeast Asia, Middle East and Central Asia. We will see many them in the near future!