CATL Brand Guidelines: The Ningde Battery Maker Spun Out of ATL in 2011

A spin-off from ATL in a Fujian port city.

CATL stands for Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited, a battery maker founded in 2011 in Ningde, a city in China’s Fujian province, where it still has its headquarters and, English Wikipedia says, its main manufacturing hub. Its Chinese name, 宁德时代, means roughly “Ningde era,” tying the company to its home city. Chinese Wikipedia says that its share of the global electric-vehicle battery market has ranked first for years, which earned it the nickname “宁王,” the “king of Ningde.”

The company grew out of an older one. English Wikipedia says Amperex Technology Limited (ATL) was founded by Robin Zeng in 1999 and at first made batteries for portable devices using licensed technology. Japan’s TDK bought ATL in 2005, and Zeng stayed on as a manager. ATL then set up a research unit for electric-vehicle batteries, and in 2011 a group of Chinese investors led by Zeng and the vice-chairman Huang Shilin acquired an 85 percent stake in that business and spun it off as CATL. TDK kept the remaining 15 percent until 2015, the same article says.

Early growth came through carmakers. According to English Wikipedia, CATL’s first main customer, in 2012, was BMW Brilliance, BMW’s joint venture in China. By 2016 it ranked third among suppliers of batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles, behind Panasonic and BYD, and in 2017 its sales of power battery systems put it first worldwide for the first time, the article says. In January 2017 it announced a partnership with Valmet Automotive covering project management, engineering and battery-pack supply, and took a 22 percent stake in that company.

In June 2018 CATL listed its shares on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange; Chinese Wikipedia dates the debut to 11 June. In the same year it announced its first factory outside China, at Arnstadt in the German state of Thuringia.

Cells, packs and storage systems.

CATL makes lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and for stationary energy storage, together with battery management systems, English Wikipedia says. Its named ranges include the Qilin and Shenxing batteries for cars, the Xiaoyao family and the Tener storage system, which it announced in April 2024. In 2021 it unveiled a sodium-ion battery for the car market, and in 2023 it announced Shenxing, a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery. English Wikipedia, citing a former Tesla battery supply-chain manager, says CATL uses a cell-to-pack method to cut the inactive weight of its packs.

Its customer list is long. English Wikipedia names carmakers abroad including BMW, Ford, Tesla and Volkswagen, and in China clients including Geely, Li Auto, Nio and XPeng. It contrasts CATL with BYD, which has prioritised battery supply to its own vehicles, while CATL has built partnerships with many carmakers. In July 2022 Ford announced it would buy CATL batteries, and in December 2024 CATL and Stellantis were reported to be planning a joint venture to build a large LFP battery plant at Zaragoza in Spain, with production expected to begin in 2026, according to the same source.

Most production is in China. English Wikipedia lists plants in eleven Chinese cities, among them Ningde, Yibin, Liyang and Xiamen, and abroad in Germany, Hungary, Indonesia and Spain. Chinese Wikipedia says the Ningde and Yibin sites were named “lighthouse” factories by the World Economic Forum.

Germany came first. LEG Thüringen, the development agency of the state of Thuringia, reported in May 2023 that CATL had officially started producing lithium-ion cells at the end of January 2023 in the Erfurter Kreuz industrial area near Arnstadt, its first manufacturing plant outside China. The agency said the site also houses research and development, that a European logistics hub had been set up nearby at Erfurt, and that the workforce had grown to around 1,000 people. A second European plant, at Debrecen in Hungary, was announced in August 2022, English Wikipedia says.

How battery makers present themselves.

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.

Two listings and a home city in its name.

CATL is a listed company rather than a subsidiary of a carmaker. In May 2025 it added a secondary listing on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange alongside its Shenzhen shares. ESS News reported on 20 May 2025 that CATL was the first company with shares listed on the mainland exchanges to seek a secondary Hong Kong listing with a price cap, and that the offering drew investors from 15 countries and regions. English Wikipedia says the money raised was meant for international expansion, including projects in Hungary, Spain and Indonesia. Chinese Wikipedia calls Robin Zeng the company’s founder.

Its size has also drawn scrutiny in the United States. English Wikipedia says the US Department of Defense added CATL to its list of “Chinese military companies” on 7 January 2025, and that the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2024 barred US defence funding for CATL products. The same article says CATL called accusations that its batteries posed espionage risks “false and misleading.” A Ford battery plant at Marshall, Michigan, planned to use CATL technology as a Ford subsidiary, was paused after lawmakers questioned its tax subsidies, according to the same source.

English Wikipedia describes CATL as the world’s biggest maker of batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage, with a global market share of around 37 percent in 2022. In 2023, the article adds, the World Intellectual Property Organization ranked CATL eighth in the world by patent applications published under its PCT system.

For a design guide, CATL shows how a battery supplier builds its public face around named ranges such as Qilin and Shenxing, and around the city written into its Chinese name. Compare BYD, the Chinese maker that has prioritised battery supply to its own vehicles, and Gotion High-Tech, a battery maker from Hefei. For this guide we use graphite, a deep teal and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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