Ganfeng Lithium Brand Guidelines: The Xinyu Lithium Maker, From Metal to Mines & Batteries

A lithium processor in Jiangxi.

Ganfeng Lithium began in 2000 in Xinyu, a city in the Chinese province of Jiangxi. English Wikipedia names its founders as Li Liangbin and Li Huabiao; the company’s own history simply records that Ganfeng Lithium was established that year. Xinyu is still its headquarters, and the group lists subsidiaries in nearby Jiangxi towns including Fengxin, Yichun and Ningdu.

It started as a chemical processor rather than a miner. English Wikipedia says the company “started out in chemical processing” before it developed mines abroad. By the company’s own account, it built its first lithium metal production base in 2003, what it calls China’s first commercial n-butyl lithium production line in 2004, a line extracting lithium chloride from salt-lake brine in 2007, and in 2009 a domestic line producing battery-grade lithium carbonate directly from brine. In 2012, it says, it completed the development of battery-grade lithium hydroxide, which it began producing in 2014.

On 10 August 2010 Ganfeng listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, according to English Wikipedia; the company calls itself the first publicly listed lithium company in China. On 11 October 2018 it added a listing on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with LG, Samsung, Dongfeng Motor and FAW Group among its cornerstone investors, English Wikipedia says. Ganfeng describes itself as the first Chinese lithium company to be dual-listed, and it now trades as Ganfeng Lithium Group.

From brine and spodumene to battery cells.

From the 2010s Ganfeng bought into lithium resources outside China. Its history lists the Mariana brine project in Argentina and the Blackstar spodumene project in Ireland in 2014; Reed Industrial Minerals and its Mount Marion spodumene project in Western Australia in 2015; and investments in Pilbara Minerals and Lithium Americas in 2017. In 2018, the company says, it formed a joint venture with Lithium Americas to develop the Minera Exar brine project at Cauchari-Olaroz in Argentina, which it says was officially put into operation in 2023; it says Mariana commenced operations in 2025.

Africa followed. Ganfeng invested in the Goulamina spodumene project in Mali in 2021, by its own account and English Wikipedia’s, and raised its holding in stages; The Metalnomist reported in September 2025 that it had bought the remaining 40% of Mali Lithium from Australia’s Leo Lithium, giving it full ownership, and that production had started in December 2024. Gasgoo reported that the first shipment of lithium concentrate from Goulamina left for China on the evening of 24 June 2025, and called it Ganfeng’s first lithium project in Africa to be developed and operated independently.

Its “global layout” page now runs from salt-lake brine in Qinghai and spodumene in Jiangxi and Inner Mongolia to projects in Australia, Argentina, Mexico, Ireland and Mali, with lithium metal plants at Fengxin and Yichun and compound processing at its Mahong plant in Jiangxi.

Ganfeng has also moved downstream. It says it entered the battery business in 2014 with Ganfeng Battery Technology, set up a solid-state battery research centre and a battery recycling company in 2016, and gathered its battery units under Ganfeng LiEnergy in 2020; English Wikipedia dates its production of batteries for electric vehicles to 2017. In 2023, the company says, it delivered its first solid-state batteries for vehicles and completed a battery technology park in Chongqing, and in 2025 it launched its first energy-storage container system. It also lists supply agreements or memoranda with LG Chem, BMW and Tesla in 2018, Volkswagen in 2019 and Hyundai Motor in 2024.

How lithium companies present themselves.

Lithium and battery-materials companies sell to other companies, not to shoppers, and their imagery is built for investors, carmakers and governments as much as for the public. Most of it starts at the source. Brine producers show their evaporation ponds from the air: long rectangles of turquoise, green and pale yellow laid out across a white salt flat, with mountains on the horizon. Hard-rock miners show open pits cut in terraces into red or ochre earth, haul trucks on the benches and stockpiles of pale spodumene ore.

The next layer is chemistry. Company photographs move indoors to white lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide powders held in gloved hands or poured from a scoop, bulk bags stacked in a warehouse, and the long kilns and furnaces of refineries and cathode-material plants. These images carry the industry’s main argument: that a mineral dug or pumped in one country becomes a battery-grade chemical in another.

The end use usually appears last, and it is almost always the same: battery cells, electric cars, charging cables and grid-scale storage containers. The pictures show where the material is meant to go.

Much of the visual language is corporate rather than consumer. Investor-day slides and annual reports lean on world maps dotted with mines, plants and offices, flow charts of the supply chain from resource to cathode, and the logos of listing exchanges. Industry gatherings such as Fastmarkets’ Lithium Supply and Battery Raw Materials conference bring producers, refiners and buyers into the same rooms, and the same maps and pond photographs reappear on stage. In a sector where few people see the product, the identity rests on landscapes, laboratories and the cars at the end of the chain.

“Utilize limited resources, create unlimited value.”

Ganfeng’s identity is a corporate one, and it was refreshed in 2020. The company’s history records that in 2020 it upgraded its brand, updated its logo and official website, and reinterpreted its vision, mission and values; the same year it set up a board-level sustainability committee. Its stated philosophy is “Utilize limited resources, create unlimited value,” which it explains as making full use of lithium resources and finding more uses for its products. In 2022 it adopted the phrase “High-Tech Ganfeng,” and in 2025, it says, it joined the United Nations Global Compact.

English Wikipedia notes that the company has been described as a “lithium supermarket,” selling lithium salts, lithium metal, other metals and batteries. Its own website groups its products into compounds and metal, batteries and materials, and solutions, and names electric vehicles, energy storage, consumer electronics, chemicals and pharmaceuticals as the markets they go into. The site is published in Chinese and English, and every page carries both of its share codes, one for the A shares in Shenzhen and one for the H shares in Hong Kong.

Its own timeline shows the steps it added over two decades — lithium metal, salts, brine, hard rock, cells and recycling — which it now presents as one group.

For a design guide, Ganfeng Lithium shows how a chemical processor can present itself as a whole supply chain under one corporate mark. Compare Tianqi Lithium, another Chinese lithium group listed in both Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and Pilbara Minerals, in which Ganfeng says it invested in 2017. For this guide we use a deep cobalt blue and a brine turquoise with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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