CATL Call
Modern electric-vehicle batteries are proving exceptionally reliable and long-lasting, performing better than many in the auto industry expected.
ICYMI: CATL holds 40.1% of the global EV battery market.
Their next closest competitor is BYD at 14.2%.
Seven of the top ten battery companies globally are Chinese, and CATL is blazing the trail for them all.
Your EV might have an OEM badge, but CATL truly owns the electric vehicle market.
The Ford Plant
Inside The BlueOval Battery Park
The BlueOval Battery Park in Marshall, Michigan, has begun producing LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) cells.
Ford owns the plant.
CATL employees are on-site training the workforce and transferring institutional and manufacturing knowledge.
Ford gets the IP and the battery cells.
CATL gets licensing fees and a US foothold without the political brouhaha of running the plant itself.
The cells will power Ford’s future Universal Electric Vehicle platform, starting with a compact electric pick-up in 2027 priced around $30,000.
The political noise around this plant has been loud.
The reality is more muted.
It is making batteries now.
Ford is not just licensing a chemistry set.
It is licensing a manufacturing system that China spent two decades designing and building.
The Battery Circular Economy Alliance
Also this week, CATL, Xiaomi, BMW, Google, Renault, and Volvo launched a global battery circular economy alliance.
The alliance is built around a Battery Circular Design Guide and expects to be operational by 2027.
It sets new standards for battery disassembly, remanufacturing, and lifecycle management.
CATL’s recycling subsidiary, Brunp, processed 210,000 tons of battery waste in 2025 and recovered 99.6% of core minerals.
The companies joining this alliance are not partners in the traditional sense.
They are adopting CATL’s framework.
The standards being written reflect how CATL already builds and recycles batteries.
Everyone else is playing a game of catch-up.
The Swap Network
CATL Battery Swap Station
CATL’s Choco-SEB battery-swap network surpassed 2,000 operational stations in China at the end of June.
In October 2025, the network had only 700 stations.
It has nearly tripled in eight months, adding more than 200 stations per month.
The network spans 31 provinces and 180 cities in China.
The target is 3,000 by year-end, with two new stations live in Hong Kong.
Starting in the second half of this year, users can generate revenue by exchanging batteries during peak pricing windows, potentially earning $7 per day, turning their vehicle into a grid energy storage asset.
Battery swapping isn’t new.
NIO has been at it for years.
What CATL is building is different in scale and in ambition.
It is not a niche service for a single brand.
It is the global expansion of a shared infrastructure usable across vehicle brands.
The Giant Robot
The Galbot S1 Industrial Robot
CATL had already built the world’s first humanoid-robot-enabled battery pack production line last year.
Then CATL partnered with heavy-robot manufacturer Galaxy General Robots to integrate its batteries into the Galbot S1 industrial robot, enabling it to lift 50 kg continuously and autonomously for 8 hours straight.
This year, CATL plans to put the Galbot S1 into its robot-enabled pack production line.
Using its own batteries to power robots that make more batteries.
The Bigger Picture
Battery pack prices hit a record-low global average of $108 per kWh in 2025.
McKinsey predicts that LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) pack costs will drop to around $55-$65 per kWh by 2035.
CATL is not just riding that cost curve. It is drawing it.
The company has committed to matching lithium costs with sodium-ion cells by late 2026.
It is mass-producing semi-solid-state batteries for stationary energy storage solutions.
It is building swap infrastructure that could reshape how consumers think about charging.
It is writing the recycling standards that the rest of the industry will follow.
Meanwhile, the Donald’s administration’s rollback of clean energy programs has stalled or cancelled at least $10 billion in US battery plant investment, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
CATL has two decades of innovation and expansion that no one else can replicate.
Ford’s Michigan plant is proof of where that road leads.
The largest automaker in North America is licensing battery technology from a Chinese company to build affordable EVs.
That is not a knock on Ford.
It is just the state of play.
IMHO
CATL is no longer just a battery company.
It is a platform.
It controls the chemistry, the manufacturing process, the recycling standards, and increasingly the charging infrastructure.
It licenses its technology to automakers who need it to compete.
It sets the design standards that everyone else must follow.
The question for the rest of the industry is not how to beat CATL.
It is about how to stay relevant in a world where CATL is the foundation on which everything else is built.