Batteries & Energy Storage

CATL

Public (SZSE: 300750 / HKEX: 3750)

Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL), founded in Ningde, Fujian in 2011 by Robin Zeng and Huang Shilin, is the largest battery manufacturer on Earth and the single most important company in the electrification of transport and the grid. It took 40.2% of global EV battery installations between January and May 2026, roughly three times its nearest rival, and has ranked first worldwide in energy-storage battery shipments for five consecutive years, shipping 121 GWh of storage cells in 2025. FY2025 revenue reached RMB423.7B (about $61B) with net profit up 42% to RMB72.2B, and H1 2026 accelerated hard: revenue of RMB276.9B (up 54.8%) and net profit of RMB43.3B (up 42.0%), with grid storage now nearly a fifth of the business at RMB53.2B. The product line spans the Shenxing superfast-charging LFP battery (third generation charges 10-80% in 3 minutes 44 seconds), the Qilin and Qilin Condensed high-density packs, the Freevoy hybrid battery, the Naxtra sodium-ion battery entering full mass production by the end of 2026, and the TENER grid-storage family, whose sodium-ion variant launched in June 2026. CATL raised $5.2B in a May 2025 Hong Kong listing, the largest IPO in the world that year, and is spending it on a European build-out: a 40 GWh cell plant in Debrecen, Hungary and a 50 GWh LFP joint venture with Stellantis in Zaragoza, Spain. Its technology now reaches the US indirectly through licensing, with Ford's BlueOval Battery Park Michigan starting operations on CATL-licensed LFP chemistry in June 2026, even as CATL itself remains on the Pentagon's Section 1260H list of Chinese military companies.

Form Energy

Private (pre-IPO round in progress; listing targeted for 2027)

Form Energy, founded in 2017 by former Tesla energy chief Mateo Jaramillo, MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang, Ted Wiley, Billy Woodford and Marco Ferrara, is building the storage technology that lithium-ion cannot economically reach: a 100-hour battery. Its iron-air cells run on reversible rusting, oxidising iron with air from the atmosphere to discharge and converting the rust back to iron to charge, using materials so cheap the company claims a cost per kilowatt-hour a fraction of lithium-ion's. That makes multi-day storage viable, the duration Jaramillo argues is where batteries stop shaving peaks and start replacing thermal power plants. The company manufactures at Form Factory 1, a 550,000 square-foot plant in Weirton, West Virginia built on a former tin mill site, which is now in production and has begun delivering its first commercial system, a 1.5 MW / 150 MWh project with Great River Energy in Cambridge, Minnesota. Demand arrived faster than anyone expected once AI data centers started hunting for firm power: Form has more than 75 GWh of commercial projects under agreement, including a 300 MW / 30 GWh system with Google and Xcel Energy announced in February 2026 that Xcel calls the largest battery project by energy capacity ever announced, and a 12 GWh capacity agreement with Crusoe for AI data centers starting in 2027. Form has raised more than $1.4B from T. Rowe Price, GE Vernova, TPG Rise Climate, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Temasek, GIC and others, is raising up to $500M more, and plans to go public in 2027.

LG Energy Solution

Public (KRX: 373220)

LG Energy Solution is the largest battery manufacturer outside China and the West's main hedge against Chinese dominance of the cell supply chain. Spun out of LG Chem on December 1, 2020 from a battery division that dates to 1992, it listed on the Korea Exchange in January 2022 in a KRW12.75 trillion (about $10.7B) offering, still South Korea's largest IPO ever. It ranks third globally in EV batteries with 8.7% share and 41.0 GWh installed between January and May 2026, supplying GM, Tesla, Ford, Hyundai, Stellantis, Honda and Toyota through wholly owned plants in Korea, Poland and Michigan and joint ventures including Ultium Cells with GM, NextStar Energy with Stellantis and L-H Battery with Honda. The interesting part of 2026 is the pivot. With Western EV demand flat and the US federal tax credit gone, LGES has swung its North American capacity toward grid storage: its $1.4B, 1.7-million-square-foot Holland, Michigan plant is the first large-scale LFP cell factory in the United States, is scaling from 17 GWh to more than 30 GWh by the end of 2026, and its output is sold out three to five years ahead. GM and LG are converting an Ultium plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee from EV cells to LFP storage cells outright. The numbers show the transition mid-flight: 2025 revenue fell to KRW23.7T as EV sales slowed, but Q2 2026 revenue jumped 24.8% year over year to KRW7.56T on ESS and cylindrical demand and the company returned to an operating profit of KRW113.3B after three consecutive quarterly losses. Guidance for 2026 is revenue growth in the mid-teens to 20% with ESS sales more than tripling.

QuantumScape

Public (NASDAQ: QS)

QuantumScape, founded in 2010 by Jagdeep Singh, Tim Holme and Stanford professor Fritz Prinz, is the best-funded Western attempt to make a solid-state lithium-metal battery work at production scale. Its cells replace the graphite anode with lithium metal formed in place and use a ceramic separator to block the dendrites that normally kill such cells. The flagship QSE-5 B-sample delivers 844 Wh/L and 301 Wh/kg with sub-15-minute fast charging, energy density well beyond conventional lithium-ion. The company remains pre-revenue on cells and is engineering rather than inventing now: the proprietary Cobra separator process went into baseline production in June 2025, B1 samples began shipping to automakers in October 2025, and an automated Eagle pilot line was inaugurated in San Jose in February 2026 and is running above 90% core-tool uptime while ramping toward doubled cell output in the second half of 2026. Volkswagen is both its largest shareholder and its industrialisation partner: PowerCo holds rights to produce up to 85 GWh of QSE-5 cells a year, with start of production still targeted for 2029, though a 2026 amendment cut potential milestone payments from $131M to $75M. QuantumScape added Honda as a multi-year research partner in June 2026, works with two more top-10 automakers, and has ceramic manufacturing collaborations with Murata and Corning. It has $859M of liquidity, reiterated 2026 guidance of a $250M to $275M adjusted EBITDA loss, and is pushing beyond cars into AI data centers, aerospace and defense.

Sungrow

Public (SZSE: 300274; Hong Kong listing application filed)

Sungrow is the company that turns batteries into a working power plant, and in 2026 Wood Mackenzie ranked it first in the world among battery energy storage system integrators, ahead of Tesla and CATL. Founded in 1997 in Hefei by former university lecturer Cao Renxian on personal savings and borrowed money, it built its business on solar inverters, where it has led global shipments for ten consecutive years with about 25% market share, then applied the same power-electronics expertise to grid storage. Storage overtook inverters as its largest business in 2025: energy storage system revenue rose 49.4% to RMB37.29B, or 41.8% of a company total of RMB89.18B, on shipments of 43 GWh (up 53.6%), with overseas volumes up 89% while Sungrow deliberately pulled back from a low-margin Chinese market. Cumulative storage shipments passed 93 GWh by the end of 2025 and the company targets more than 60 GWh in 2026 alone. Its flagship PowerTitan 3.0 platform, launched in June 2025 and brought to Europe as a grid-forming system in January 2026, spans 3.45 MWh 10-foot to 12.5 MWh 30-foot containers built on 684 Ah stacked cells and a fully liquid-cooled silicon-carbide power conversion system reaching 99.3% peak efficiency, with grid-forming features including 20-millisecond reactive response and gigawatt-scale black start. Net profit reached RMB13.46B in 2025, up 22%, and at a roughly $40B market capitalisation Sungrow refiled for a Hong Kong listing in April 2026 to fund overseas manufacturing.