In the eyes of Chinese public fund managers who like to pile up to buy stocks, the Ningde era was once more certain than Moutai – in November this year, the Ningde era surpassed Moutai for the first time to become the company with the largest public fund holdings.
However, recently, the market has obviously lacked confidence in the Ningde era. Since December, catalpa times has fallen by 15.18%. Especially today (24th), the stock price of Ningde Times fell by 7.28%, and the market value was 100 billion yuan a day. The sharp decline also brought about the collapse of other companies in the lithium battery industry chain and the ChiNext index.
In fact, the business and financial situation of the Ningde era have not changed much, and even the profit margin is better than analysts expected. Valuations fluctuate sharply, and more reflect the future of the Ningde era may not be as "certain" as the market thought before.
In the first three quarters of this year, the operating income of CATL was 73.362 billion yuan, an increase of 132.73% year-on-year, and the net profit attributable to the mother was 7.751 billion yuan, an increase of 130.90% year-on-year. At the same time, its comprehensive gross profit margin in the third quarter reached 27.90%, an increase of 0.66 percentage points from the previous quarter, and its performance was stable in the case of a significant increase in the price of resources and materials.
But as we discussed earlier, the high sales of new energy vehicles have caused the price of metals such as cobalt and lithium, which are widely used in power batteries, to rise faster and higher. As a result, the Ningde era occupies more than half of the domestic and about 1/4 of the global power battery supply, and is also facing very large cost pressure.
In the middle of this year, Australian lithium miner Pierara announced the launch of an online auction platform to bid for lithium concentrate sales – in the past, lithium concentrate prices were mainly driven backwards by downstream lithium salt prices. Wind data shows that the price of spodumene in Australia has risen from about $500/ton at the beginning of the year to more than $2,000/ton today.
With the continuous hot sale of electric vehicles and the limitation of the supply capacity of the mineral itself, CICC expects that lithium ore may further exceed demand in the next few years.
In order to control costs, CATL spent 889 million yuan in the Kisanfu copper and cobalt mine project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in April this year, setting a precedent for domestic battery factories to invest in the cobalt project; in September, they invested 1.552 billion yuan in the African Manono lithium project. Battery manufacturers such as Ewell Lithium Energy and Guoxuan Hi-Tech have also increased their investment in cobalt ore and lithium ore this year.
What is uncertain is whether these investments can be further transformed into cost advantages, and whether investments such as battery research and development and capacity expansion can continue to be converted into products with stable quality and suitable prices.
According to SNE Research, six of the top ten companies in the world's top 10 power battery installed in October were Chinese companies. The Ningde era is still the first, but the next few changes are relatively large. For example, Hive Energy and Ewell Lithium can replace Lishen and Vision Power on the list. In particular, Hive Energy announced at the second battery day this year that the global capacity planning target for 2025 will be increased to 600GWh, which is similar to the planning of the Ningde era.
In addition, the iteration of power battery technology is also accelerating. In the Ningde era to improve the energy density of lithium batteries (CTC technology) and develop sodium-ion batteries, BYD's blade batteries with high energy density and low space occupation were commercially used on BYD's "Han EV" on a large scale. Guoxuan Hi-Tech and Hive also have their own new battery technologies. (Gong Fangyi)