Kamal Ghorui
The world’s no. 1 battery maker — CATL — has a message for America: You cannot make Electric Vehicles (EVs) without China. Chinese battery giant CATL, formally known as Contemporary Amperex Technology, is the largest EV battery producer in the world. At second position, after CATL, is another Chinese company BYD. As some lawmakers in the US want to block automakers from using Chinese batteries, Chinese companies seem unfazed and are reportedly saying: Good Luck with that, Hahaha.The general conclusion in the Chinese battery industry, led by CATL, is that the US auto market is going to suffer and lag others due to these protectionist efforts. Robin Zeng, founder of CATL and China’s fourth richest person, strongly believes that the US market is doomed without his company. As around a third of the world’s new EVs had CATL batteries in 2025. Also, BYD, the world’s no. 1 EV car company produces its own batteries.
America’s ‘problem with Chinese batteries
According to a recent report in Wall Street Journal (WSJ), critics of China argue that embedding a Chinese battery maker in the US supply chain would make the country even more vulnerable to Beijing’s economic coercion and undercut the chances of American battery companies catching up. In 2025, America placed the battery maker CATL on a Pentagon list of companies working with China’s military. On its part, CATL calls this designation “erroneous”.While the designation does not involve immediate bans on the Chinese companies added to this list, it is seen as a blow to the reputations of affected companies and represents a stark warning to US entities and firms about the risks of conducting business with them.
What makes CATL dominate EV battery market worldwide
CATL has grown to become the world’s largest electric-vehicle battery manufacturer thanks to its technology and low costs. It posted record profit of more than $10 billion last year, and an estimated one in three EVs sold around the world carries its batteries. The EV market in the U.S. will remain small “for several years. But after that, it’ll have to be booming, because it is the trend. It is the future,” said ZengAlso, CATL’s dominance in the world EV market so far is largely without sales in the US and Europe, where electric adoption lags behind that in China. Also, like the US in Europe too, CATL’s presence is limited. One of America’s largest auto companies, Ford reportedly recently ditched South Korea’s SK Group as its joint-venture partner for battery projects, focusing instead on its plan to build CATL-designed batteries at a $3 billion factory in Michigan. As per WSJ report, Ford is paying to license the Chinese company’s intellectual property, a workaround that the US allows while it puts up legal and political barriers to prevent CATL from building its own plants.Similarly, General Motors (GM) is reportedly set to import China-made batteries from CATL and put them in its new Chevrolet Bolt. This after swallowing a 60% tariff due to the company’s Chinese origin. GM is selling the Bolt for only one model year while it makes longer-term plans. The report said that GM is paying a hefty tariff to get CATL batteries at a time when two US battery plants GM spent billions of dollars to build are lying idle. The reason is reportedly their inability to make cheaper batteries that the automaker needs for the $30,000 vehicle.Not just this, America’s largest electric car maker Tesla too is using CATL technology for a battery plant in Nevada producing energy-storage systems, a business that is growing strongly while Tesla’s core EV business has stalled.
CATL CEO Robin Zeng is China’s national hero
In China, Zeng is a national tech hero. In 2025, he was invited to meet Chinese PM Xi Jinping. In March 2026, he was invited to Beijing to attend China’s biggest annual political event as an advisory body member. “We will sell our Chinese products globally and at the same time, we will promote our technology and standards worldwide,” he is said to have told reporters at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Talking of America, Zeng said, “US people all go to chips, software, AI” because “they get a lot of money,” he said. Batteries are considered “a very stupid industry in the US.”
