The numbers are in, and they make for uncomfortable reading if you’re sitting in Seoul, Detroit, or Brussels. Last year, Chinese battery manufacturers controlled 70.4% of the global EV battery market, up 20% from the year before. Basically, all car-producing nations outside of China are losing the battle for battery independence.
Gradually, the fears are becoming a reality. China’s battery dominance is hitting the rest of the world like a freight train. At the center of it all stands CATL. The Ningde-based giant alone captured 39.2% of global EV battery installations last year, according to figures released by SNE Research.
The rise of CATL is staggering: 464.7 GWh in absolute terms, a 35.7% increase year-on-year. To put it into perspective: its share is now larger than the combined total of every Korean and Japanese battery maker on the planet.
Record profits
CATL’s 2025 financials are a clean sweep: net profit hit a new record of 72.2 billion yuan (+42%), while revenue grew 17%. The factories are running flat out. All of this while battery raw material costs remain volatile and global trade tensions are flaring. We’re not talking luck; this is an extraordinarily well-run industrial machine.
BYD comes in second place and secures a 16.4% share of the global market, up almost a third from the year before. CALB is the third largest battery maker in China, followed by Gotion in fourth place.
The flip side of China’s rise is the quiet implosion of its Korean rivals, which deserves particular attention. LG Energy Solution (9.2%), SK On (3.7%), and Samsung SDI (3.4%) collectively now hold just 15.3% of the global market, down from 30% five years ago. LG Energy Solution’s net profit collapsed 76% in 2025, while SK On and Samsung SDI both reported losses.
The problem for the Koreans is their strong bet on the US market. A gamble that turned into a nightmare amid increasingly shaky policies under the current US administration, which has strangled EV subsidies and worsened trade relations through import tariffs. All industry players, depending on the White House, currently bleed.
Graveyard of good intentions
The European picture is not much sunnier. Northvolt, the great hope for European battery sovereignty, filed for bankruptcy protection in late 2024 and is now being relaunched by American Lyft. ACC sank two of its planned factories, leaving only the French site, and is ailing.
Hope remains dire. Europe has produced no credible alternative to Asian supply at scale. Meanwhile, CATL has been quietly planting its flag on European soil: its first-phase factory in Debrecen, Hungary, came online at the end of 2025, conveniently inside the EU’s customs border and therefore shielded from any import tariffs.
This is the essential paradox of European industrial policy on batteries: years of subsidy programs, strategic frameworks, and political speeches about supply chain resilience… and yet it is CATL that built the factory.
European automakers like Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW continue to depend on the Chinese supply for their most critical electrification programs. That’s a dependency with strategic consequences for the near future.
A concentration problem the size of an elephant
There’s no denying that a single company controlling nearly 40% of the supply of the technology that underpins the entire EV transition is a concentration risk that should set off alarm bells. But that conversation remains oddly muted, perhaps because automakers depend so heavily on CATL supply that they have little incentive to amplify the concern.
However, CATL is not invulnerable. China’s domestic EV market showed early signs of a hangover in early 2026, with new energy vehicle sales dropping 28% year-on-year in the first two months of the year after the government tightened its subsidy scheme; whether that’s seasonal noise or something more structural remains to be seen.
But for now, the global battery industry produced a ranking in 2025 that Western policymakers spent the better part of this decade trying to prevent. They didn’t succeed. Chinese producers now control seven of the top ten positions in the global battery market by installation volume.
