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In the global zero-carbon transformation wave, power batteries, as the intersection of energy and transportation, are becoming increasingly strategically important. Against this backdrop, the competition in the power battery field is no longer just a competition between individual companies, but has risen to a strategic game and contest among major economies.
Recently, US President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. According to the law, electric vehicles that qualify for tax credits and incentives must be finally assembled in North America and use North American battery components. The critical minerals for batteries must also come from North America or countries with trade agreements with the United States.
In fact, since Biden took office, the funds invested in electric vehicles, power batteries, and charging facilities in the United States have reached $85 billion, far exceeding the semiconductor industry. It is obvious that this is the "awakening" of the United States based on its own hollowing out of the industrial chain, aimed at preventing being constrained by the power battery supply chain in the trend of electrification. Europe woke up earlier than the United States. In the past two years, various European countries, including the UK, Germany, France, and Spain, have been enthusiastically carrying out "strong chain supplement" in the field of electrification, and a Europe-wide power battery "new infrastructure" is vigorously unfolding.
In this competition among global economies, China's power battery industry has already taken a lead. It has achieved an absolute lead in various dimensions such as marketization, supply chain completeness, technology and product innovation, enterprise scale, and growth rate. From the perspective of marketization, China's electric vehicle and power battery industry has already moved beyond the stage driven by industrial policies, which is in sharp contrast to countries and regions such as the United States and the European Union, which are still driven by subsidies.
In the supply chain link, China is dominating every link of the global electric vehicle supply chain. According to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), China refines 68% of the world's nickel, 40% of copper, 59% of lithium, and 73% of cobalt; produces 70% of positive electrodes, 85% of negative electrodes, 66% of separators, and 62% of electrolytes. At the same time, China has more than three-quarters of the power battery production capacity for electric vehicles. At the level of technological innovation, after more than ten years of growth, Chinese companies' innovation in battery materials, structure, process, and equipment fields is constantly emerging. In terms of both quantity and quality, China has become the biggest source of innovation in power battery technology worldwide.
In terms of building enterprise competitiveness, China's power battery industry has grown a large number of global leading enterprises in various segments of the industry chain and has begun to export the "Chinese solution" to empower the electrification transformation of various countries. Taking the power battery link as an example, in the global power battery installation ranking from January to July 2022, Chinese companies occupied six seats, namely CATL, BYD, SVOLT, Guoxuan High-Tech, EVE Energy, and Farasis Energy. These six companies accounted for a market share of up to 57.6% of global installation volume, and the growth rate of Chinese companies far exceeded that of their Japanese and Korean counterparts.
