During the Chinese New Year holiday, production lines of major battery suppliers including CATL, Gotion High-tech, and FinDreams were running to meet the high demand.
(Image credit: CnEVPost)
If you have too many orders for your business, then you can't afford to take holidays off. Such is the case for China's power battery industry.
As China just saw the end of the week-long New Year holiday, a report in the Shanghai Securities News today depicts how busy power cell suppliers were during the week.
"During the Spring Festival holiday, many of CATL's operational production sites in China were working at full capacity," the report said, citing a source at the supplier to Tesla and Nio.
This year's Chinese New Year holiday runs from January 31 to February 6, with February 7 being the first working day of the holiday.
At one of Gotion High-tech's plants in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, more than half of the employees worked during the holiday, and four power cell production lines were at full capacity.
At a plant of BYD's power cell division FinDreams in Guiyang, Guizhou province, more than 1,000 people gave up their holiday break, according to the report.
FinDreams has built six production lines in Guiyang, with a capacity of 15GWh, and is now in the ramp-up phase. The plant resumed work on February 3 to prepare for a full-year capacity release, according to the report.
Mainstream battery makers are ramping up production at the start of the Year of the Tiger just because of strong demand for power batteries, with several new energy vehicle makers complaining about difficulties in obtaining battery supply, the report said, citing industry experts.
In a conference call following the release of third-quarter earnings on November 10 last year, William Li, founder, chairman, and CEO of Nio, said CATL was trying its best to secure battery supply for the company, but that was still the ceiling for Nio's deliveries.
In late December, local media outlet 36kr reported that Li had told the team that it could care less about CATL's offer of a few cents more per Wh of battery than its peers, and that the priority was to get the battery supply.
The 36kr report at the time had also mentioned that a number of car companies, including Nio, were seeking to reduce their dependence on CATL.
Nio's staff had been frequenting BYD and the two sides were picking up business cooperation, the report said.
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