Battery Giant CATL’s Shanghai Plant Resumes Pre-lockdown Output

Jiemian News learned on Saturday from Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd. (CATL), the foremost leader of the power battery industry, that about 90% of the company’s employees had returned to work at its Shanghai plant. Production capacity has now recovered to the plant’s pre-lockdown level and the factory plans to increase its production once conditions permit.

CATL previously announced that the factory producing power battery modules had resumed production on April 18th. The factory is located in the Shanghai Lingang New Area, adjacent to Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory. Tesla was one of CATL’s biggest customers of its battery products last year.

The company said that the recent epidemic outbreak as caused some uncertainty in its logistics and supply chain, and some employees were blocked from returning to work. The interruption introduced new challenges to the company’s production and operations.

The company disclosed that, as one of the first batch of key enterprises in Shanghai to resume work and production, the local government departments handled more than 300 inter-provincial and intra-city passes for CATL, which effectively guaranteed the company’s logistics.

During the most recent closed production period, CATL separated the production and living areas of employees, and constructed an emergency response plan to ensure effective production and epidemic prevention. In addition, the plant operators can check the flow and health condition of personnel in the factory in real time.

As work resumes at CATL’s Shanghai plant, suppliers to the company have also been able to resume their production.

However, CATL’s financial results have not been satisfactory. On April 30, the company released its first quarter report for 2022. During the reporting period, the company garnered a revenue of 48.68 billion yuan ($7.3 billion), a year-on-year increase of 154%, while its net profit hit 977 million yuan, down 41.5% year-on-year.

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CATL’s has also triggered a chain reaction in the stock market. On May 5, the first trading day after the Labor Day holiday, CATL’s stock price dropped by more than 13%, causing its market value to plummet by nearly 80 billion yuan. On Friday, CATL’s stock price reached 375.99 yuan per share, compared with the highest level of 692 yuan per share five months ago. Its market value was only 876.4 billion yuan on Friday, down 723.6 billion yuan from the 1.6 trillion five months ago.