“King Ning” locks in Honda’s six-year super order

In the wave of second- and third-tier battery factories chasing “Ning Wang”, Ning Wang fought a defensive battle.

Ningde Times announced on December 8 that it had signed a purchase agreement with Zhongrui (Beijing) Trading Service Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Zhongrui Company”), which will purchase about 123Gwh lithium batteries from Ningde Times between 2024 and 2030 .

Zhongrui Company is a company that was just established in November this year and is responsible for purchasing batteries for the three car companies of Honda China, Dongfeng Motor and GAC Group. Katsushi Inoue, chairman of Honda China, serves as chairman of Zhongrui Company.

In other words, this order from the Ningde era was provided to Honda and its domestic joint ventures, and the order until 2030 was locked at once.

Based on the battery capacity of the two main pure electric models e:NS1 and e:NP1 currently sold by Honda in China, this order of 100 Gwh can solve the battery supply problem of more than 2 million Honda vehicles.

These power batteries will be produced intensively at CATL’s Yichun factory. According to the planning of Ningde era, the factory will have a production capacity of more than 70GWh by the end of 2024, and will be an important part of the global supply chain of Ningde era in the future.

It is worth mentioning that this cooperation is not a common mode of subcontracting production lines and supplying them from specific production lines in the industry. Instead, CATL signed a memorandum of strategic cooperation with Honda to seek a long-term and stable supply of power batteries.

According to Honda’s plan, it plans to launch 10 new pure electric models in China in 2027, and by 2030, the annual sales of electric vehicles in China will reach 800,000 (400,000 each for GAC Honda and Dongfeng Honda). The Ningde era has become an important support for Honda to achieve this goal.

Ou Zichen, manager of Wanjia New Energy Theme Fund, believes that this order has verified the competitiveness of Ningde Times in the field of power batteries, and will also effectively consolidate Ningde Times’ global installed capacity share.

According to the latest data released by SNE Research, from January to October, CATL’s global market share was 37.7%, an increase of 5 percentage points from 32.6% at the end of last year.

According to the calculations of institutions such as Kaiyuan Securities, based on the power battery purchases of Ningde Times and Honda this time, Honda’s annual purchases will be second only to Tesla, becoming the second largest customer of Ningde Times.

Of course, this calculation is somewhat static, but it is enough to show the importance of this order to Ningde era. At present, the top 10 battery manufacturers can not do without the support of major customers. Just like BYD is to Fodi Battery, and GAC is to China Innovation Aviation, even the rise of “Ningwang” cannot be separated from the early support of BMW and the later global sales of Tesla.

Soochow Securities analyzed that 2022 to 2024 is the window period for battery factories to obtain fixed points for 2025-2030.

In other words, in the next two years or so, the orders won by battery manufacturers will determine the amount of orders in hand, which in turn will affect the market structure in the next five to eight years.

After Ningwang and Diwang, second-tier battery manufacturers such as Honeycomb Energy, China Innovation Aviation, and Sunwoda are accelerating the expansion of customers. According to data from the Power Battery Industry Innovation Alliance, Ningde Times’ share of domestic power battery companies’ installed vehicles has dropped from 52.1% at the end of last year to 48.02% in the first November; the same is China Innovation Aviation, Guoxuan Hi-Tech, Sunwoda And Yiwei Lithium can easily double the market share growth.

The Ningde era is also well aware of this point, and major overseas customers have become the focus of its efforts. After Ningde Times German factory officially obtained the 8GWh battery production license in April, Ningde Times announced in August that it would spend more than 50 billion yuan to build a 100GWh production line in Hungary, which is the largest single order it has announced so far. body investment projects. Its purpose is to win European car companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, BMW and Stellantis.

It can be seen that this year Ningde era has won orders from many car companies at home and abroad, or signed cooperation agreements.

According to incomplete statistics from Wall Street, CATL has officially announced nine battery cooperation projects this year, seven of which are from overseas. Including the European bus company Solaris, Ford, BMW, American FlexGen, American Primergy, VinFast and Japan’s Daihatsu, etc. are all the cooperation partners of Ningde era, and the cooperation with BMW is also a large order of tens of billions of yuan. Hyundai also has a plan to adopt Ningde era CTP battery packs to its new electric vehicles in 2024.

When these established car companies chose the Ningde era, they also mentioned that they were looking for more stable and long-term cooperation in the supply chain. This group of leaders and trendsetters in the fuel age also hopes to take advantage of Ningde’s production capacity and product advantages in the electric vehicle era to recover their lost time and market share.

Especially after experiencing the “battery shortage” caused by the supply chain blockage in the past two years, stable power battery supply and high-quality production capacity have become the “certainty” pursued by car companies and battery manufacturers.

Wang Zidong, deputy secretary-general of the China Power Battery Innovation Alliance, also said at a recent forum that there may be overcapacity of power batteries in the market, triggering market consolidation. Second- and third-tier battery manufacturers lack experience in large-scale supply, but blindly expand, and will eventually be merged and reorganized due to low capacity utilization.

“Ningwang” successively won orders from major customers, which is a profile of this production capacity and product competition. The competition in the future is cruel. If you want to survive, you can only do your best to compete for customers.