NextFin News - CATL’s latest message to the battery market is that the hardest part of the chain is not chemical processing, but getting enough material out of the ground in the first place. That matters because it pushes the bottleneck discussion upstream, toward mines, permitting, infrastructure and geopolitics, at a time when the company is still expanding fast. CATL said in its 2025 annual report, released on March 10, 2026, that revenue rose 17% to RMB 423.7 billion, net profit increased 42% to RMB 72.2 billion, and annual lithium battery sales reached 661 GWh.
CATL, the world’s biggest battery maker, is also leaning harder into energy storage. Its annual report said energy-storage shipments accounted for 30.4% of the global market in 2025 and that its energy-storage system integration business grew by more than 160% year on year. In a June interview, CATL energy-storage director Kevin Tang said energy storage had risen from 2% of battery sales five years earlier to 25% now, and that CATL expected it to reach half of global sales by 2030. He also pointed to higher prices for lithium, copper and aluminium as a challenge for storage makers.
The significance is larger than one company’s supply-chain preference. If mining is the scarce step, then refining capacity alone cannot solve shortages in batteries, storage systems or the broader electrification buildout. Refineries can only handle material that has already been extracted. Mines, by contrast, face long lead times, permitting risk and infrastructure bottlenecks, which makes them harder to expand quickly when demand turns up.
That is why CATL’s framing lands as a warning, not a slogan. The battery industry has spent years adding cell plants, cathode plants and processing capacity. But each step downstream still depends on ore, and the more the industry scales, the more painful any upstream shortage becomes. CATL’s own numbers show the scale of that dependence: 661 GWh of battery sales and a 39.2% share of the global power-battery market in 2025, alongside a fast-growing storage business that still relies on the same raw-material base.
Mining, Not Refining, Is the Real Constraint
The battery chain is often described as if all bottlenecks are interchangeable. They are not. Refining is a conversion problem; mining is a physical extraction problem. A plant can improve purity and consistency once feedstock exists. It cannot replace an undeveloped ore body, close a permitting gap, or bypass the need for roads, water, power and labor at a mine site.
That difference matters because the lead times are not remotely similar. Processing assets can often be built faster than mines, which is why policy debates in localizing battery supply chains can look more advanced on paper than they are in practice. A refinery announcement may be enough to satisfy a political target. It does not guarantee ore supply, and it does not eliminate reliance on whichever jurisdictions already control the minerals.
CATL’s own annual report gives the point more weight. The company said annual lithium battery sales reached 661 GWh in 2025, while energy-storage system integration shipments grew by more than 160% year on year. Large-scale growth at that pace turns upstream fragility into a commercial problem immediately. If raw materials tighten, the pressure shows up in procurement, pricing and delivery schedules long before it shows up in a balance sheet.
That is why mining access is increasingly strategic. The companies that secure ore first will have more room to protect margins, sign long-term contracts and keep production schedules stable. The companies that rely on a narrow supply base will inherit the volatility of the commodity cycle even if their factories are full.
“Rising prices of raw materials including lithium, copper, and aluminium … pose another challenge to energy storage manufacturers,” Kevin Tang, CATL’s director of energy storage systems for Europe, said in June.
Tang’s comment is useful because it shows the issue is not theoretical. Higher raw-material prices hit storage economics directly. When input costs rise, system prices rise. When supply tightens, projects slip. And when projects slip, the market’s assumptions about how quickly electrification can scale become too optimistic.
CATL’s Growth Story Depends on the Same Raw Materials
CATL’s push into energy storage reinforces the same point from a different angle. The company is treating storage as a major growth engine because the market is expanding alongside renewable power buildout and rising electricity demand from data-driven industries. Its June comments showed how quickly the mix has changed: storage has gone from 2% of battery sales five years ago to 25% now, with a target of 50% by 2030.
But storage does not escape the raw-material problem. The chemistry may differ from an electric vehicle pack, but the upstream dependence remains. Lithium is still central, and copper and aluminium remain important across the wider system. So when CATL says mining, not refining, is the bigger hurdle, it is also acknowledging that diversification does not remove physical dependency. It only changes where demand shows up first.
That has implications beyond CATL. For battery makers, the best hedge may no longer be another factory line but access to mines and long-term supply agreements. For policymakers, the lesson is that refining incentives without mining development risk creating a highly polished middle layer with nowhere to source enough feedstock. And for the market, the message is that battery pricing and margins are still likely to be governed by upstream material swings even after years of investment in manufacturing.
CATL’s annual report also suggests the company has reason to keep stressing scale. It said its energy-storage shipments reached 30.4% of the global market in 2025, and that its energy-storage system integration business grew by more than 160% year on year. The larger the market becomes, the less forgiving it is of upstream delay. At some point, the chain does not fail at the factory. It fails before the factory can get enough material.
The next question is not whether refining matters. It does. The question is whether the battery industry is willing to treat mining as the true strategic chokepoint. CATL’s message suggests that is where the pressure now sits.
What makes that conclusion important is its simplicity. Battery markets can build more processors and more pack plants, but they cannot manufacture ore. Until mining expands fast enough, the industry’s cleanest-looking bottleneck may still be the one that starts in the ground.
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