CATL Chairman Expects to See New Cars Equipped With Kirin Battery
At the 2022 World EV & ES Battery Conference held in Sichuan on July 21, Robin Zeng, Chairman of Chinese battery giant CATL, mentioned the Kirin battery in his speech. This battery will be able to stably achieve an EV cruising range of 1,000 km, and many new car models will be equipped with the product next year.
Zeng said that in the past 10 years, the increase of energy density of power batteries has brought about a six to seven times increase in cruising range and an 80% reduction in costs. However, the recent price increase of raw materials has led to an increase in the cost of battery enterprises.
The executive also revealed that CATL’s market share in Europe is growing at a high speed. According to the latest data from SNE, the global market share of CATL reached 34% in the first half of this year. At present, CATL’s products have covered 55 countries and regions around the world, and the shipment of power batteries has exceeded 400GWh. One out of every three electric vehicles in the world is equipped with CATL’s batteries.
Zeng believes that mineral resources will not become the bottleneck of battery development. In the past year or so, the prices of raw materials such as lithium carbonate, PVDF and lithium hexafluorophosphate have soared. However, Zeng emphasized that the proven lithium resource reserves can produce 160TWh lithium batteries, which is fully enough to produce power batteries and energy storage batteries needed globally.
SEE ALSO: Li Auto Pure EV Might Use CATL’s Kirin Battery
CATL is strengthening the recycling of battery materials. At present, the recovery rate of nickel, cobalt and manganese in CATL’s batteries has reached 99.3%, while that of lithium has reached over 90%. After 2035, recycling the materials in used batteries by CATL can meet a large part of the market demand.
In terms of R&D expenses, Zeng revealed that CATL has a R&D team of more than 10,000 people and invests 6-7% of its revenue in R&D every year. 7.7 billion yuan was spent on R&D in 2021.
