According to 36 Krypton, several industry chain sources revealed that CATL recently launched a “lithium mine rebate” plan aimed at reducing the cost of power batteries.
According to reports, this plan is only for many strategic customers such as Ideal Automobile, Nio Automobile, Huawei, and Zeekr Automobile. The core terms are: in the next three years, the price of lithium carbonate for some power batteries will be settled at 200,000/ton. At the same time, the car companies that signed this cooperation need to commit about 80% of their battery purchases to CATL.
At present, the price of battery-grade lithium carbonate is as high as 470,000 RMB per ton. If batteries can be purchased at a cost of 200,000 RMB per ton, the cost of car companies will be greatly reduced. According to sources, these customers are companies that CATL predicts will have good shipments, and Tesla is not among them. After the cooperation is signed, it will be implemented in the third quarter of this year. At present, some car companies are already in the process of cooperation signing.
At the same time, the CATL also proposed a price reduction request of about 10% to the upstream. Some material suppliers said that in the past CATL had higher gross profit, and rarely pursued such a large price reduction appeal.
The CATL’s move also troubled other battery manufacturers. However, some second and third-tier battery manufacturers have begun to respond. It is reported that Great Wall’s Honeycomb Energy has also launched a 10% price reduction plan, and some suppliers have received emails from Honeycomb Energy asking for price cuts.
As of press time, CATL has not responded to this.
