Tianqi Lithium Brand Guidelines: From a 1995 Shehong Plant to Greenbushes & SQM

A state plant in the Sichuan Basin.

Tianqi Lithium traces its history to 1992, when construction began on its first lithium carbonate plant in Shehong, according to the history in its 2022 Hong Kong listing prospectus. Shehong is a county-level city in the east of Sichuan province, administered by the prefecture-level city of Suining. On 16 October 1995 the company’s predecessor, Shehong Lithium, was established there as a state-owned enterprise by four Sichuan companies, the prospectus says, making battery-grade and industrial-grade lithium carbonate and other chemical products.

It passed into private hands a decade later. The businessman Jiang Weiping set up Tianqi Group Company in December 2003 and in 2004 acquired Shehong Lithium from the Shehong County government, the prospectus says. On 25 December 2007 the business became a joint stock company named Sichuan Tianqi Lithium Industries, and on 31 August 2010 it listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

It also secured resources at home. The prospectus records an exploration licence for spodumene deposits at the Yajiang Cuola mine in 2008 and a mining licence there in 2012, a 20% stake in a company developing the Zhabuye salt lake in Tibet in 2014, the purchase of a battery-grade lithium carbonate plant at Zhangjiagang in Jiangsu in April 2015, and the operating assets of a lithium metal plant at Tongliang, near Chongqing, in 2017. The company is now based in Chengdu, the Sichuan capital, and says on its website that it has been in the lithium business “since 1995.”

Greenbushes, Kwinana and the Atacama.

Tianqi’s defining move was overseas. In 2014, the prospectus says, it acquired a 51% interest in Windfield, the Australian holding company that owns Talison Lithium and the Greenbushes mine, an open-pit hard-rock lithium mine south of the town of Greenbushes in Western Australia; it raised the money through a private placement of shares completed in February 2014. Albemarle holds the other half of the mine’s owner, The West Australian reported in July 2022.

Tianqi then built a processing plant in Australia. It began investing in a lithium hydroxide plant at Kwinana, south of Perth, in September 2016, the prospectus says. In December 2020 it agreed to bring in the Australian miner IGO as a partner, and on 2 July 2021 the deal completed, leaving IGO with 49% and Tianqi with 51% of Tianqi Lithium Energy Australia, the company that holds the Greenbushes stake and the Kwinana plant. The West Australian reported in July 2022 that Tianqi and IGO had announced first commercial production of battery-grade lithium hydroxide at Kwinana that May.

In Chile it bought into SQM. Tianqi agreed in May 2018 to buy SQM Series A shares from the fertiliser company Nutrien, and the purchase completed on 3 December 2018, leaving it with about 25.86% of SQM and the position of second-largest shareholder, the prospectus says. When SQM agreed a lithium partnership with the state copper company Codelco on 31 May 2024, a Tianqi-linked shareholder asked for an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting to vote on it; the regulator rejected that in June 2024, CNN Chile reported. Tianqi contested the deal in several forums, and in late January 2026 Chile’s Supreme Court rejected its appeal, upholding a Santiago appeals court ruling of November 2025, Caixin Global and CNN Chile reported. Caixin gave Tianqi’s stake in SQM then as 22.16%.

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.

“Changing The World With Lithium.”

On 13 July 2022 Tianqi added a second listing, in Hong Kong. The West Australian, carrying a Bloomberg report, called it the largest share sale in the city so far that year and reported that the shares fell as much as 11% in early trading before trimming their losses; Caixin Global reported the same day that the stock was below its offer price at midday. The company is now listed in both Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

Its website presents Tianqi as “a new energy materials company with lithium at its core” and gives its guiding philosophy as “Changing The World With Lithium.” It describes a business spanning hard-rock resources, lithium concentrate and lithium chemicals, with a presence in China, Australia and Chile. Its main products, it says, are chemical-grade and technical-grade spodumene concentrates and lithium carbonate, lithium hydroxide, lithium metal and lithium chloride, sold for electric vehicles, consumer electronics, energy storage, drones, glass and ceramics. The site also links to a lithium science museum and a provincial key laboratory for lithium resources, and the company’s Australian arm keeps its own website.

The company tells its story as a timeline: a county chemical plant, a private takeover, a Shenzhen listing, then stakes in an Australian mine and a Chilean producer.

For a design guide, Tianqi Lithium shows how a company can build its identity on a long timeline and a handful of large stakes abroad. Compare SQM, the Chilean producer in which it holds a stake, and Albemarle, its partner at Greenbushes. For this guide we use a deep teal and a red earth with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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