CALB Brand Guidelines: A Luoyang Aviation Battery Start-Up Rebuilt in Changzhou

A battery unit inside the aviation industry.

CALB’s roots are in China’s state aviation industry. According to the Chinese automotive trade site Gasgoo, which summarised the company’s Hong Kong prospectus in January 2023, the story begins in 2007, when the China Airborne Missile Academy — a public institution set up by the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) — established Sky Energy (Luoyang) in Luoyang, Henan province, to make lithium iron phosphate batteries. Chinese Wikipedia also dates the start to 2007.

In 2009 AVIC and the academy restructured Sky Energy, which was renamed China Lithium Battery Technology (Luoyang) in September that year, Gasgoo reported. English Wikipedia expands the initials CALB as China Aviation Lithium Battery. In 2010 AVIC added capital through several subsidiaries, and Sichuan Chengfei Integration Technology, a listed AVIC company, became the majority shareholder.

The Luoyang company built its early business on buses and other commercial vehicles, which Chinese policy favoured in the first wave of electric-vehicle promotion, Gasgoo said. In 2011, English Wikipedia says, it won a large order from the Hangzhou government, which had begun running electric taxis on CALB batteries.

The model did not last. Gasgoo reported that the company’s profits peaked in 2016 and turned to losses in 2017 and 2018, after subsidy rules shifted towards batteries with higher energy density and the company was slow to move beyond its commercial-vehicle focus. English Wikipedia says AVIC then looked for a buyer, and that the Luoyang government was unable to provide the financial support required; it also says the military business was later spun off.

Jintan District, a new chair and a listing.

The rescue came from Jintan District in Changzhou, Jiangsu. Citing the prospectus, Gasgoo reported that a company called CALB Technology had been set up in Changzhou on 8 December 2015, half owned by Jinsha Investment, with 30 percent held by the Luoyang company and 20 percent by Huake Investment; both investment companies are ultimately owned by the Jintan District government. After a restructuring completed in July 2019, CALB Technology came under the control of a group of Jintan-based investors, and later capital increases brought in employee shareholding platforms and other investors, among them a Xiaomi-linked industry fund.

Under chairwoman Liu Jingyu, English Wikipedia says, the company turned to batteries for passenger cars and returned to profit. Chinese Wikipedia dates her appointment and the move of the headquarters from Luoyang to Jiangsu to 2018, and says CALB became the leading battery supplier to GAC’s new-energy vehicles in 2020. Gasgoo reported that the company was profitable again in 2021, and English Wikipedia names Changan, Leapmotor and XPeng among its other customers.

The name changed again on 18 November 2021, when CALB Technology became CALB Co., Ltd., Gasgoo reported. The company’s own timeline calls 2021 the year of a “brand strategy upgrade” and describes 2018 as the start of a “second entrepreneurial journey.” By June 2026 the company’s name appeared in US government listings as CALB Group Co., Ltd.

CALB’s shares began trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 6 October 2022, opening in line with their issue price, Reuters reported in a story carried by China Daily Hong Kong; the report described the investor response as lukewarm. The company calls itself the first power-battery company listed on the Hong Kong exchange.

Cells, packs and gigafactories.

Battery makers sell mostly to other companies: carmakers, bus and truck builders, and the developers of grid storage. Few drivers ever see the name on the cells under the floor of their car, so these firms tend to build their public image around the product itself and the scale of the places where it is made, rather than around a consumer logo on a shop shelf.

The visual language that results is fairly consistent across the category. Press images often show a cell or pack in cutaway, with its layers, modules and cooling channels opened up like a technical drawing. Factory photographs favour long, white, brightly lit production halls, with workers in clean-room clothing beside automated lines. Product pages pair battery packs with renders of a bare electric-vehicle chassis, and storage products appear as rows of steel containers set out on open ground.

Trade fairs are where much of this imagery is first shown. Shows such as The Battery Show in North America and CIBF, the China International Battery Fair, gather cell makers, materials suppliers and equipment builders, and many makers time product names and launch films for those stands. Named product ranges, rather than model numbers alone, have become a common way for makers to give a cell chemistry or pack design a memorable identity.

The makers in this group are documented unevenly. Founding dates, stock listings, factory openings and major shareholders can usually be checked in public sources, while claims about chemistry, capacity and performance often rest only on the company’s own word. This guide keeps those two kinds of statement apart and attributes each claim to the source that makes it.

Create Amazing Life by Battery.

CALB makes lithium-ion batteries, battery management systems and integrated products, and its website organises them by use: passenger cars (battery-electric, plug-in hybrid and range-extended), commercial vehicles, energy storage, marine, eVTOL aircraft, robots and light mobility. In 2022 it ranked third among China’s power-battery makers by installed capacity, behind CATL and BYD, according to figures from the China Automotive Power Battery Industry Innovation Alliance cited by Gasgoo. Its named ranges include the UP cylindrical battery and the ZHIYUAN and Boundless batteries; the company also says it introduced a lithium iron manganese phosphate battery in 2022 and a 314Ah energy-storage cell in 2023.

Production is spread across China. The company lists industrial bases in Changzhou, Xiamen, Chengdu, Wuhan, Hefei, Jiangmen and other cities, and says it has set up bases in Europe and Thailand and research centres in Changzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Chengdu, Hefei and Europe. Chinese Wikipedia says the first production line at its Jiangmen base in Guangdong started in April 2023.

On 8 June 2026 the US Department of Defense added CALB Group Co., Ltd. to its Section 1260H list of Chinese military companies, as one of 17 new parent-level listings alongside BYD, EVE Energy and NIO, according to a client alert from the law firm WilmerHale dated 12 June 2026.

The name doubles as a slogan: on the company’s website the four initials become “Create Amazing Life by Battery,” next to the line “CALB, Battery Expert.” For a design guide, CALB shows how a set of initials from a state aviation group can be kept, and given a new meaning, after a change of owner and city. Compare SVOLT, another battery maker headquartered in Changzhou’s Jintan District, and BYD, the Shenzhen maker of cars and batteries. For this guide we use a deep teal and a signal orange with cool greys and a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CALB’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.