Two Companies Make 65% of China's Lithium Batteries

CATL installed 333.57 gigawatt-hours of vehicle batteries in China in 2025, 43.42% of the national total. The scale is easier to grasp by comparison than in absolute terms: it is more than every company ranked third to fifteenth added together, and more than twice what BYD managed in second place. On the treemap it is the tile that forces every other tile to be small.

BYD's 165.77 GWh and 21.58% share come with a structural difference worth naming. BYD builds the cars its batteries go into, so a large part of that figure is the company supplying itself, where CATL sells to manufacturers across the industry. Two very different businesses produce the top two positions in the same table.

Both lost a little ground in 2025 even while growing. CATL's share came down from 45.08% the year before and BYD's from 24.74%, in a market that expanded 40.4%. Losing share in a market growing that fast means the companies behind them grew faster still — which is the only competitive pressure visible anywhere in this ranking.

Third place is a long way down. CALB installed 53.61 GWh for a 6.98% share — a sixth of CATL's volume, and the gap between second and third place is wider than the nine smallest named firms produce between them. No company outside the top two reaches 7% of the Chinese market.

Behind CALB the ranking tightens into a genuine contest. Gotion High-tech took 43.44 GWh and 5.65%, Eve Energy 31.61 GWh and 4.11%, Sunwoda 24.35 GWh and 3.17%, Svolt Energy 20.71 GWh and 2.70%, and Rept Battero Energy 19.50 GWh and 2.54%. Six firms, all within about four percentage points of each other, sharing a fifth of the market between them.

These are not small companies in any ordinary sense. CALB, in third place, installed more batteries in China alone than Panasonic installed worldwide across every market it serves. The ranking makes the chasing pack look marginal only because of what sits above them.

The eleventh entry is the only one on the list that is not Chinese-owned. LG Energy Solution installed 13.75 GWh in China during 2025, a 1.79% share. LG is the world's third-largest battery maker by global installations, and in the largest single market on Earth it sits behind ten domestic firms. No other foreign manufacturer appears in the ranking at all.

Below LG the numbers fall away quickly. Yinpai Battery took 0.82%, Cornex 0.70%, and Yuanhang Genlead and Do-Fluoride tied on 4.30 GWh and 0.56% each. By rank fifteen a company's entire annual output is roughly what CATL installs in five days.

And then the list simply stops being meaningful. Those fifteen names cover 98.43% of every battery installed in China in 2025. Everything else — every remaining manufacturer in the country — divides 12.10 gigawatt-hours, roughly a third of what fifth-placed Eve Energy managed alone. That grey tile is not a rounding error; it is the entire long tail of an industry.

A Chinese battery pack averaged $84 per kilowatt-hour in 2025, down 13% on the year. North American packs cost 44% more and European packs 56% more, and the International Energy Agency puts production costs in Europe and the United States as much as 50% higher than in China before any subsidy is counted — attributing the gap to manufacturing efficiency and automation as much as to cheaper materials and components.

Chemistry is doing much of the work. Lithium iron phosphate made up 81.2% of Chinese installations in 2025, 625.3 GWh of the total. LFP uses iron and phosphate instead of nickel and cobalt, and BloombergNEF puts LFP packs at $81 per kilowatt-hour against $128 for the nickel chemistry they displaced. A market that standardised on the cheaper chemistry earlier gets the cheaper price sooner.

Scale compounds it. When one company installs 333 gigawatt-hours in a year, the fixed cost of a production line is spread across a volume no smaller manufacturer can match, and its suppliers price accordingly. The concentration visible in the treemap and the price gap visible in the cost tables are the same phenomenon measured two ways.

These are installations, not production. CABIA counts batteries fitted into vehicles sold in China, so a cell exported to Europe or the United States never appears here, and a foreign-owned plant inside China does. The table describes a market rather than a set of factories, and the two are not the same map.

It is also a domestic ranking, not a global one. Measured worldwide, CATL takes 39.2% and BYD 16.4% of 1,187 GWh, and LG rises to third place on 108.8 GWh — nearly eight times what it installs inside China. The companies that look marginal in this table are not necessarily marginal outside it.

And it covers vehicle batteries only. Grid storage is a large and fast-growing segment with its own ranking and its own competitors, and it does not appear in these figures at all. A company weak in cars can be strong in storage without any of it showing up here.

CATL and BYD made 65% of every vehicle battery installed in China in 2025, in a market of 769.7 gigawatt-hours growing at 40% a year. Thirteen more named firms take almost all of the rest, and the entire remaining industry divides 1.57% between them.

That concentration is the mechanism behind the price. A pack costs $84 per kilowatt-hour in China and 56% more in Europe, and the reasons — manufacturing efficiency, automation, an early standardisation on cheap LFP chemistry, and volumes no smaller producer can match — all follow from a handful of companies operating at a scale nobody else reached first.

It also means the world's battery price has very few authors. When two firms set the terms in the market that makes most of the world's cells, a decision inside either one travels further than a policy in most countries. The treemap is not just a picture of who is winning; it is a picture of how few hands the pricing sits in.