Gotion High-Tech Brand Guidelines: The Hefei Battery Maker With Volkswagen as Top Shareholder

A Hefei start-up and an indirect listing.

Gotion began in 2006 in Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, as Hefei Guoxuan Hi-Tech Power Energy, founded by Li Zhen, English Wikipedia says; “Gotion” is the later English form of the Guoxuan (国轩) name. The company’s own profile gives the same founding year and says it is still headquartered in Hefei. Its early years were difficult: English Wikipedia says it struggled financially for several years until the Chinese government began heavily subsidising the country’s lithium-ion battery industry in 2009.

Its route to the stock market was indirect. Chinese Wikipedia says the listed company began as Jiangsu Dongyuan Electrical Group, which joined the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in October 2006; Guoxuan used it for a backdoor listing in September 2014, and on 29 September 2015 the listed company took the name 国轩高科股份有限公司, Gotion High-tech Co., Ltd. English Wikipedia dates the listing to 2015 and describes it as a reverse takeover, while Gotion says it was listed in Shenzhen in May 2015. Chinese Wikipedia lists power transmission and transformation products alongside batteries for new-energy vehicles among the group’s main businesses.

A second listing followed abroad. In 2022 Gotion listed in Switzerland, on the SIX Swiss Exchange, English Wikipedia says.

By 2020, the Chinese trade site Gasgoo reported, Gotion was China’s third-largest battery maker, after CATL and BYD, with factories in cities including Qingdao, Hefei, Tangshan and Nanjing. Gotion’s own timeline records a strategic agreement with Tata AutoComp in 2019, ground broken for a production base in Liuzhou in 2020, and work on four production bases, in Yichun, Feidong, Tongcheng and Hefei’s Xinzhan area, in 2021.

The Volkswagen stake.

The decisive change came from Germany. On 28 May 2020 Gotion announced that Volkswagen Group China would take a 26.47 percent stake through a non-public share issue, making the carmaker its biggest shareholder, Gasgoo reported. The same report said Li Zhen and parties acting with him would hold 18.2 percent and that he would remain the actual controller, and called the deal the first direct investment by a foreign carmaker in a Chinese battery maker. Gasgoo added that Gotion would become an authorised supplier to Volkswagen, with a chance to supply batteries for the electric cars it sells in China. English Wikipedia gives the stake as 24 percent.

Gotion’s own history says the strategic agreement with Volkswagen Group China was signed in 2020, and that in 2021 the investment was completed, Volkswagen became the largest shareholder and Li Zhen remained the actual controller. Its corporate profile still names Volkswagen Group as its largest shareholder, and describes Gotion as the first nominated supplier of Volkswagen’s Unified Cell.

Gotion says it makes lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) materials and cells, battery packs for vehicles and for energy-storage systems, and battery management systems, for passenger, commercial and special-purpose vehicles. Its cells come in cylindrical, prismatic and pouch formats, and English Wikipedia adds that it also produces cathode and anode active material. The company describes a vertically integrated chain, from raw materials such as lithium salt and nickel-cobalt ores through cells and packs to recycling, and calls its solid-state design the “Gemstone Battery.”

It says it runs eight research and development centres, among them an engineering institute in Hefei, an international R&D headquarters in Shanghai’s Jiading district, and centres in Cleveland, Silicon Valley and Tsukuba in Japan. Among its honours, Gotion lists a national “Green Factory” title from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in 2018 and a first prize for technological progress from Anhui province in 2020.

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.

From Göttingen to Big Rapids.

Gotion’s first European base was a former Bosch plant. The company says it acquired the Bosch Group’s plant in Göttingen, Germany, in 2021 to set up its first new-energy production base in Europe. English Wikipedia lists factories at Göttingen and at Fremont, California, and announced projects at Manteno in Illinois, Kenitra in Morocco and Valladolid in Spain, as well as a 25 percent stake in the Slovak battery maker InoBat. Gotion says it is organised into four regional business units, for China, Asia-Pacific, the Americas and Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and is establishing twenty overseas manufacturing sites for materials, cells and packs.

Its American arm, Gotion, Inc., runs its own website from Fremont, listing locations in Fremont and Independence in the United States, Tsukuba, Singapore, Shanghai and Göttingen, and offering cells and packs for energy storage and electric vehicles.

One American project did not go ahead. Plans for a plant in Green Charter Township, near Big Rapids, Michigan, met local opposition over the company’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party, English Wikipedia says, and led to lawsuits. On 24 October 2025 the Central Michigan public broadcaster WCMU reported that the Michigan Economic Development Corporation was ending state support for the planned plant, saying Gotion Inc. was in default on its contract and had been inactive on its benchmarks for more than 120 days, and that the agency was seeking to recover state funds used to buy the land.

English Wikipedia says that in 2025 Gotion held a 3.5 percent share of the global battery market, which made it the world’s sixth-biggest battery maker.

For a design guide, Gotion High-Tech shows how a battery maker presents a carmaker shareholder, a materials-to-recycling chain and an international network of sites as one identity. Compare CATL, the Ningde battery maker spun out of ATL, and BYD, which has prioritised battery supply to its own vehicles. For this guide we use navy, a moss green and a pale stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Gotion High-Tech’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.