CATL, Ningde
Indicative delayed market price: a tension gauge, distinct from the physical flow. A rise signals the input tightening.
The world's leading cell manufacturer. Beyond the factories, China refines most of the lithium, graphite and cobalt: battery chemistry, more than extraction, is the choke point.
Moving the factory does not move the license
Building gigafactories in Michigan or Hungary is supposed to free the West from Chinese dependence. Yet several of these plants operate under a CATL license. Ford is erecting in Marshall (Michigan) an LFP plant whose technology, equipment and part of its teams are supplied by CATL under a service contract (the so-called LRS model); Tesla signed a comparable deal for its LFP line in Nevada.
The lock is contractual, not geographic: even produced on American soil, the cell pays a royalty to Ningde and rests on recipe know-how, dosing of active materials, electrode formation, calibration, that Beijing can restrict from export under the control of "key technologies" introduced in 2024. Moving the factory does not move the patent.
LFP, the chemistry the West let slip away
Lithium iron phosphate now accounts for more than 40 % of global EV batteries and the overwhelming majority of stationary storage, precisely the segment where CATL dominates. Yet its founding chemistry owes much to North American patents (Goodenough, Hydro-Québec, University of Texas). Western industry, judging LFP too low in energy density, abandoned it in the 2010s for nickel-cobalt.
China industrialized it into a near-manufacturing monopoly: nearly all LFP cathodes come out of it. The West's return to LFP, forced by cost and safety, thus happens by licensing back a technology it had invented then discarded, a dependence it chose by abandoning that chemistry.