Battery Manufacturing Heavyweight CATL to Bag 58.2 Billion Yuan in Private Placement
Leading Chinese battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL) announced on the evening of August 12 that it plans to issue shares to no more than 35 specific investors in a non-public manner, raising a maximum of 58.2 billion yuan ($8.98 billion) to invest in lithium batteries and supplement working capital.
CATL disclosed that the raised funds will be mainly used for the construction of five lithium battery production bases in the provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and Jiangsu, with a capital demand of 41.9 billion yuan. Another 7 billion yuan will be used for technology R&D and related projects. The remaining 9.3 billion yuan will be used as supplement working capital.
The firm revealed at a results briefing held in May that total investment in the company’s production capacity currently under construction had exceeded 90 billion yuan. According to statistics released by Korean analysis agency SNE Research, the installed capacity of power batteries in CATL reached 34.1 GWh worldwide in the first half of this year, exceeding LG Energy Solution’s installed capacity of 28 GWh by about 20% and coming in first in the rankings.
In July last year, CATL completed its initial non-public offering of shares after its 2018 listing, raising a total of 19.7 billion yuan. At that time, the issue price was 161 yuan per share and the number of issued shares was 122 million. Most of the funds raised have been used to build new lithium battery factories in Fujian, Guangdong and Sichuan.
In last year’s non-public offering, nine investors became CATL’s new shareholders. Among them, Hillhouse Capital bagged half of the shares with a 10 billion yuan value; Honda Motor (China) Investment also subscribed for 3.7 billion yuan.
Last year, CATL earned a revenue of 50.3 billion yuan and net profits of nearly 5.6 billion yuan. In the first quarter of this year, the company’s revenue was 19.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 112%. Meanwhile, net profits came in at 1.9 billion yuan, an increase of 163% over the same period last year.
Recently, CATL released its first generation of sodium-ion batteries, with the energy density of 160Wh/kg, planning to form a basic industrial chain in 2023.
At the close of Thursday trading, the share price of CATL was 502 yuan per share, with a total market value of 1.17 trillion yuan. Since November 2019, CATL has gained a cumulative 632% and its market capitalization has increased by more than 1 trillion yuan.
