Electric Battery Makers Should Fear This Factory

China’s CATL is building a mammoth plant as it tries to expand abroad

- Jie Ma, David Stringer, Zoey Zhang, and Sohee Kim, with Elisabeth Behrmann

The isolated city of Ningde, on the mountainous shoreline of the East China Sea, is best known for fishing and farming. Only recently have a few Starbucks and McDonald’s outlets begun to show up in this home to 3 million. When President Xi Jinping apprenticed here as a Communist Party chief in the 1980s, it was the poorest city on the coast. Now, however, Ningde should have Panasonic, Samsung SDI, and LG Chem, the Big Three makers of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, running scared.

For seven years, Ningde has been home to the sprawling headquarters of Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd., or CATL, which has quickly become China’s EV battery leader and is setting its sights on the rest of the world. On the landfilled mudflats across a lake from its main campus, the company is building a $1.3 billion battery production complex that will be second in size only to Tesla Inc.’s massive Gigafactory in Sparks, Nev., enabling it to outstrip the capacity of other suppliers. CATL plans to finance construction partly by going public as soon as this year, selling a 10 percent stake that would value it at about 130 billion yuan ($21 billion). The next targets: expansion in Europe and a toehold in the U.S.