The China Center for Information Industry Development (CCID), situated under the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, recently released its “2021 White Paper on China Lithium Battery Industry Development Index.” The report analyzes the scale and level of the development of China’s lithium battery industry, covering market, capital, innovation and supply aspects.
According to the white paper, the development index of China’s lithium battery industry reached 307.6 in Q4 of 2021, more than three times that of 2017. In 2021, the scale of China’s lithium battery industry reached 324GWh, four times that of 2017.
China has now been the world’s largest lithium battery consumer market for five consecutive years. In 2021, the global lithium-ion battery market reached 545GWh, and China accounted for more than half of the total. By the end of 2021, China’s power battery production capacity accounted for about 70% of the global total. Additionally, six of the top 10 lithium battery manufacturers in the world are from China.
The white paper also shows that the country’s southwestern regions have the richest mineral resources such as lithium and phosphorus, and the phosphate rock reserves in Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan account for more than 40% overall. Therefore, investment has shifted from the southeast coastal areas such as Jiangsu and Fujian to the western provinces and cities such as Sichuan and Guizhou. In terms of the investment in lithium battery projects in 2021, Sichuan ranked first in China, with a total investment of 170.67 billion yuan ($25.5 billion), accounting for about 18% overall.
Strong demand for new energy vehicles is one of the main factors underpinning the recent surge in China’s lithium battery industry.
Ma Chengen, a senior engineer of CCID, said that it was estimated that global demand for power batteries should be close to 1 T watt-hours in 2025, while the proportion of China’s power battery market of the world’s total should reach about 60%. Driven by the Chinese government’s carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, there will be great technological growth in the future energy storage market, and it also has great development potential in the fields such as electric bicycles, electric tools and battery recycling.
