Chinese battery giant CATL shrugs off EV sales slowdown to press on with expansion

The founder of China’s world-beating battery manufacturer is pressing ahead with expansion in the face of a global slowdown in electric-vehicle sales growth.

Contemporary Amperex Technology is not worried about overcapacity, and in fact will crank up output of its more technologically advanced products, said Robin Zeng, president and chairman of the company better known as CATL. In his first interview with an international news outlet since 2020, he said his company has found the solutions to getting battery-charge times down to 10 minutes, and is working on reducing them even further.

“It’s a necessary process,” Zeng said of the dynamics playing out in China’s electric-vehicle industry. “The Chinese EV market, unlike policy-driven overseas markets that are still stuck at low penetration rates, is now market-driven.”

Zeng offered his survival of the tech-savviest assessment on Monday from Hong Kong, where he delivered one of the keynotes at a sustainability conference. His view that market forces are taking hold in China is reinforced by the central government doing away with national subsidies at the end of 2022. Around that time, Tesla fired the opening salvo in a price war that has squeezed profit margins for many manufacturers and put others further into the red.