On May 18, 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden, who had been wrestling at the gate a few months ago, showed up at Ford's factory in Dearborn, Michigan. Wearing the iconic Ray-BanAvior sunglasses, he test-drove a pure electric version of the Ford F-150 with a 4.4-second acceleration of 100 kilometers.
As everyone knows, the U.S. law stipulates that the president cannot drive himself, nor can he retire, so when he visits the car company, he takes a test drive and becomes a valuable opportunity for presidents to let themselves go: George W. Bush has driven a 6.2-liter Cadillac, Obama has driven a hybrid Chevrolet Volt, Trump is the fiercest, and has test-driven a missile carrier produced by Lockheed Martin.
However, in addition to making himself addicted, the most important purpose of Biden's drag show in Ford is to sell the public a $174 billion electric vehicle industry support program — an ambitious plan led by the Democratic Party, but the biggest enemy is the Republican Party, which is hostile to the new energy industry.
How do you get Congress to pay for it? Biden skillfully coined Washington's most popular code of wealth: China.
At the meeting after the test drive, Biden first elaborated on the importance of electric vehicles, and then immediately raised his voice to an octave: "The R & D investment in the automotive industry, the United States used to be the first, China is the eighth; now the United States is the eighth, China is the first." The author has gone through the data sources of the automotive industry and is very sure that the data that Comrade Biden talked about is -- blindly compiled.
Then he pointed the finger at the power battery: "China makes 80% of the world's power batteries, they make it not only in China, but also in Germany and Mexico, and then export it to the whole world." But China can't win! The audience listened to a bout of confusion, and then Biden did not hesitate to explain: "Because we will not let them win", and the audience burst into thunderous applause.
In the technological innovation of power batteries, the United States is indeed not afraid of China. In the late 1990s, Zeng Yuqun bought a polymer patent from Bell Labs in the United States and cracked the drum problem before breaking into Apple's supply chain. But in the process of industrialization, the United States spent ten years but the progress was slow, the whole first-come process, Biden is actually a witness.
As early as when Biden was still the second in command of the Obama team, the US government began to support the battery industry chain, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize two "seed players" of power batteries: Ener1 and A123, but when Obama and Biden left office, the two hot chickens of the year were paste, one bankruptcy liquidation, one was acquired by China's Wanxiang Group.
During the Trump administration, the US new energy industry chain did not have much breakthrough, and when Biden 'vice-post turned positive" four years later, although the United States had the most valuable assets of the world's new energy vehicles - Tesla and Musk's 11784 tweets, it has lagged behind significantly in the field of power batteries - even if Biden Drag Racing's pure electric version of F150, the battery is not made in the United States.
But then again, the United States does say it wants to "defeat you," and it never says," "America alone will defeat you."
In fact, in the years of sword-fighting on both sides of the ocean, we have witnessed countless times the presidents of the United States "harsh words" on industrial issues, communications, photovoltaics, steel, chips, aerospace, vaccines... And so on, but the so-called Sino-US industrial dispute is usually not "one China vs. one America", but "one China vs. The United States and its allies".
So, just 17 hours after Biden's harsh words, South Korean President Moon Jae-in's Boeing 747 plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington. In the delegation on the plane, there was a middle-aged man named Kim Jong-hyun, who ran a large company with 20,000 employees and made power batteries.
The name of this company is called LG New Energy. There is no doubt that it is a member of the American team.
01
Prologue: The first shots fired in the United States
Founded in 1947, LG Group ranks among the top five chaebols in South Korea, and its reputation in South Korea belongs to the general of the dwarf, which is relatively good.
When the head of Samsung Group, Lee Jae-yong, was imprisoned, three generations of SK and Hyundai Group were arrested for drug abuse, and the father and son of Lotte Group were involved in the suicide of Zhang Ziyan, LG's painting style was slightly normal, family members maintained a gentle image of harmlessness to people and animals for a long time, the succession of power was smoothly transitioned without tearing, and the credibility of the company ranked first among the chaebols.
LG started with the chemical industry in its early years, earned its first bucket of gold by making toothpaste, soap, combs, tableware and other products for the Korean people, and then entered the electronics and home appliances in the 1950s, selling radios, electric fans, refrigerators, televisions, air conditioners and other products, and then entered the semiconductor in the 90s.
The reason why LG entered the power battery is inseparable from a "nuclear power journey" in the 90s of the last century.
In 1992, when LG was also called Lucky GoldStar, in March of that year, the third-generation head of LG, Shigeru Kumotomoto, came across a battery while visiting the Institute of Nuclear Energy (AEA) in the United Kingdom. This kind of battery is not the kind of dry battery that is used up and thrown away, but a secondary battery that can be charged multiple times, that is, the earliest lithium cobalt oxide battery.
Coincidentally, Sony bought the patent for the cathode material from AEA, and after returning to China, it developed the 18650 cylindrical battery and achieved great success. Because of the advantages of energy density, cycle life, etc., lithium batteries have become the best choice for consumer electronics, and Japan has almost monopolized the entire market for more than a decade, with a market share of more than 95%.
Although Shigeru Kumoto was late, he still brought the sample back to China and handed it over to the subsidiary responsible for mineral development at the time for research, but there was no progress, and the cooperation with Japan was also ruthlessly rejected, although the first batch of experimental products was produced in 1997, but due to quality problems, it was not mass production until 1999.
At first glance, China is not too far behind, Tianjin Lishen also began mass production of lithium batteries in 2000, China and South Korea seem to be on the same running line, but LG's deep chemical engineering hegemonic background, strong financial strength and advanced international vision make it run out of the "100-meter sprint" speed together, leaving China behind early.
In 2000, before Wang Chuanfu could start building cars, Shigeru Kumoto set his sights on Detroit. LG has set up a wholly owned subsidiary company CPI in the United States, only half an hour's drive from Detroit, specializing in on-board lithium-ion batteries, preparing to launch a "curve overtaking" for Japanese companies that have been entrenched in this field for a long time.
Power battery line is a typical capital and technology high barrier industry, and the technology iteration is fast, it is not like the general auto parts to buy after plug and play, because of safety and cost, especially emphasize and the close cooperation with the main engine factory, once into the car supply chain, it is not easy to be kicked out, the first-mover advantage is obvious, so LG early R & D center in the United States, but also in order to more with the Detroit set almost.
Shigeru Kumoto's decision was undoubtedly a gamble at the time.
The world's first car powered by lithium batteries was nissan's Prairie Joy produced in 1997, although it served in the Arctic for 6 years without any problems, but the sales were negligible, because the new energy vehicles at that time were either using lead-acid batteries like the General EV1, or using nickel-metal hydride like Toyota Prius, lithium batteries were non-mainstream.
But Shigeru Kumoto wanted to give it a go and put all his attention on Detroit.
He believes that this business will improve in 2003, when LG will become the first choice of car companies with first-mover and distance advantages, but it backfired, the once popular EV1 was dragged to the desert in 2002 and destroyed, the new energy vehicle industry fell silent again, and the then US President George W. Bush was also an iron fan of hydrogen energy, and Shigeru Honda's wishful thinking could only be postponed.
Out of fear of burning money bottomless pits, opposition to the battery business is growing within LG's board of directors. In December 2005, Shigeru Kumoto received a report stating that the rechargeable battery business was expected to lose 200 billion won (about 1.6 billion yuan), equivalent to LG Electronics' net profit for more than half a year.
But Shigeru Kumoto still tried to defy the public opinion and left this piece of business, for only three words: unwilling.
When the Asian financial crisis broke out in 1997, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung implemented the "Big Deal" policy, requiring large groups to focus on their main businesses and resell subsidiaries in non-dominant industries to rivals, under the pressure of the government, the number of LG subsidiaries was reduced from more than 60 to 40.
Shigeru Kumoto has always been grumpy about this matter, he believes that the reason why LG was surpassed by Samsung is because the semiconductor business was abandoned halfway, so when the board of directors suggested that he give up the power battery, he bluntly denied it, and it turned out that this was the "Dunkirk moment" that determined LG's fate.
Two years later, South Korea began to rain in time, allocating $300 million to help LG and Samsung develop batteries,[12] solving Shigeru Kumoto's urgent needs.
At the same time, a white knight appeared on the other side of the Pacific. At that time, GM was planning to develop the Volt, an extended-range electric vehicle, and set off a "competition to recruit relatives", and after screening, only LG Chem and A123 were left out of 27 candidates. Although LG Chem was larger and more experienced in production, people were more optimistic about the A123 hatched from MIT at the time.
The core advantage of A123 is that the lithium iron phosphate cathode material is manufactured into uniform nano-scale ultra-small particles, which increases the surface area to increase the discharge power of the battery, and theoretically the material cost is lower and safer, but the processing process requirements are very high, and LG uses manganese oxide-based electrode materials, and the energy density is slightly inferior.
Considering the price, safety, and stability of production capacity,[13] GM finally chose LG, and it was with this order that LG became famous in the automotive circle and quickly built a factory in the United States, located in Holland, two and a half hours away from Detroit, which can support 60,000 electric vehicles per year, which is also publicized by Obama as a major achievement.
This factory is the first foreign battery factory to be established in the United States. When construction began in 2010, Obama personally congratulated the President of the United States for the first time ever to attend the groundbreaking ceremony of a South Korean company,[2] and a historic encounter between the U.S. auto industry and the South Korean battery industry, and the alliance between the two countries was established.
Obama and the late LG group chief Shigeru Kumoto, 2010
For this project, Obama gave a very generous discount, a total of 303 million US dollars of investment, the federal government gave 150 million US dollars in subsidies, Michigan gave a tax reduction package worth 150 million US dollars, which is much higher than the treatment of Tesla in Shanghai, it can be said that the South Koreans almost used a perfect leverage to pry open the US market.
At the opening ceremony of the new factory in 2010, Obama greeted In Korean with Kumoto Mao, obama at that time would not have thought that the US electric vehicle industry would go high and low, and local battery companies would almost all be wiped out, and Ku Ben Mao would not have thought that LG Chem's biggest opponent would come from China, and it was not even established at that time.
02
Twists and turns: Twenty years of entering China
If the Japanese have enlarged the lithium battery market through laptops and mobile phones, then the Koreans have sublimated it to a higher level by developing power batteries, and even German materials science experts can't help but blow a rainbow fart on LG Chem's new energy batteries: "At least more than ten years ahead of their peers, no one can surpass [4] for the time being." "
After receiving GM's endorsement, LG soared all the way and won orders from Volvo and Ford in succession, but the news that made Shigeru Kumoto the most excited was undoubtedly from China.
At that time, the Ministry of Science and Technology led by WanGang launched the demonstration project of "ten cities and thousands of vehicles", and a large number of subsidy policies gushed out, and LG Chem won the orders of SAIC, FAW and Changan in one go, and these three major state-owned enterprises accounted for 60% of domestic sales that year. This one-sided posture cannot be blamed on the unpatriotic state-owned enterprises, but can only be blamed on the fact that there was not a single one in The country that could fight at that time.
In 2010, the company that did the best in China's power battery had a yield rate of only 60%, while Japan and South Korea had already achieved more than 90%, equivalent to our ceiling, and it was not a basic model in others.
In addition to the disparity in production efficiency, Japan and South Korea mainly take the ternary (nickel cobalt manganese / aluminum) route in the material system, compared with the domestic mainstream lithium iron phosphate, the energy density advantage is obvious, and LG in the packaging process and the main push soft package, high safety, strong customizability, comprehensive crushing China.
In fact, LG can capture GM's heart in a very short period of time, and successfully knock on the door of China, in addition to the Korean consumer electronics industry has been nourishing, but also indispensable to the credit of Chinese suppliers.
As early as 2004, LG began to produce batteries for 3C electronics in Nanjing, and intends to reduce costs by cultivating domestic suppliers, doing the sinking of cathode materials, doing Shanshan and Beiterui of the negative electrode, Jiangsu Guotai doing electrolytes, and Kodali doing structural parts have successively entered the LG supply chain in this context and become an enviable senior migrant worker.
Objectively speaking, working for Koreans has indeed taught Chinese lithium batteries a lot of real skills, but in turn has also grown the prestige of their opponents. Academician Chen Liquan has also analyzed that the reason why Chinese suppliers are willing to sell materials to South Korean companies is because the other party has large orders and there are tax rebate subsidies for exports, which also leads to cheaper costs of raw materials in South Korea [12].
On the other hand, due to the poor consistency of domestic products and the low level of automation, battery factories need to purchase equipment from Japan and South Korea at high prices, coupled with the low yield rate, which pushes up the production costs of domestic enterprises, resulting in all-round backwardness.
LG was bent on supplying Chinese customers early, and in 2014 set up a joint venture, and Samsung SDI did the same, and the two sides built the new factory in just one year.
Although the enemies have hit the doorstep, there is almost no power to fight back in the country, watching their customers being robbed.
For example, Samsung SDI won Yutong, to know that Yutong is not only China's largest bus factory, but also the largest customer of the Ningde era (2015), accounting for 46% of revenue, and LG also won the new orders of Great Wall, Chery, Geely, Ankai, and Jinlong, which made domestic counterparts feel uneasy and worried.
The views of Qin Xingcai, president of Tianjin Lishen, are very representative. He has publicly suspected that Korean battery companies are monopolizing China, believing that Korean chaebols can first lose a billion yuan on power batteries to reduce the price, so that domestic companies may be killed in the cradle [5].
Although there was no actual evidence that The South Koreans dumped it, this view of turning the gun on the outside was very marketable at the time. Until now, many people believe that because of the fear that the market is monopolized by South Korea and subsidies fall into the pockets of South Koreans, the state has launched a "white list" to keep them out, but the actual situation is not so simple.
At the beginning, LG and SDI were very shrewd, they only took the Chinese factory as a processing destination, did not put the most core electrode preparation process in China, nor did they establish a research and development center, and the government at that time clearly stipulated that power battery companies wanted to supply in China, at least with the production capacity of key processes such as electrode preparation, lamination/winding, assembly, and liquid injection, so it was not surprising that Korean companies failed.
Soon, South Koreans realized the problem and began to make amends, spending about three months building electrode production lines, and by 2016 things had changed subtly.
At the beginning of the year, for safety reasons, the Chinese government announced the suspension of the inclusion of ternary lithium battery buses in the recommended list, and Korean companies were all ternary lithium batteries at the time, so they lost a big cake. Soon after, the new national standard for power batteries also began to be implemented, requiring ternary lithium batteries to pass the needle prick experiment, and Japan and South Korea battery factories can only seize the time to do experiments while changing the process in order to enter the white list as soon as possible.
After adjustment, when the South Korean battery factory thought everything was ready, the THAAD incident broke out and Sino-South Korean relations quickly cooled.
A month before the outbreak of the THAAD incident, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released 32 domestic companies into the white list in one go, but LG and Samsung were still missing, various rumors began to spread, and the white list policy that was not directly linked to subsidies before began to be given a certain color of political confrontation, which was considered to be a new energy version of the "Korean restriction order".
Although the "white list" policy may not have been rushing to "limit Korea" at the beginning, the original intention was to eliminate backward production capacity by raising industry barriers, so as to screen out excellent enterprises for precise support, but this combination of punches down, Ningde era undoubtedly became the biggest winner.
Although South Korea's batteries are cheap and inexpensive, even high-end products are 10% lower than domestic [5], but due to the delay in forming a substantial supply after more than a year of production, the original customers really can't wait, SAIC, Geely, Dongfeng, GAC have all fallen to the Ningde era, and it has established a joint venture, and SDI and LG in China the pace of expansion has also come to an abrupt end.
The tilt of the policy coupled with the time difference between capacity expansion has created an excellent window period for the Ningde era to climb production capacity and technology. It is precisely because of the corners dug up by Japan and South Korea that the snowball of the Ningde era has become bigger and bigger, and finally became the world's first in 2017, which is also China's first "world champion" in the field of auto parts.
On May 20, 2018, Shigeru Kumoto, who has been at the helm of LG Group for more than 20 years, passed away, leaving behind a 100 billion empire, and the battery business he single-handedly built became a new engine that could not be tolerated, and successfully turned a profit to make up for the adverse impact of the collapse of the mobile phone business, at the same time, China's whitelist system has also died in name only, reopening the door to foreign brands, and Korean companies have also made a comeback.
A month later, CATL was listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, setting a record of 24 days; another month later, CATL announced the construction of a factory in Germany and won a 31 billion yuan super order from BMW; LG did not hesitate to let go, announcing an investment of 2 billion US dollars in Nanjing in July, and announcing an investment of 1.63 billion US dollars in Poland in August.
03
Clash: The Hunger Games in the upper middle reaches
In the battery industry, the focus of competition is different depending on the stage.
The 1.0 stage is about "technology is king", whoever makes the first technological breakthrough will be able to eat the first wave of dividends. However, in the 2.0 stage, the strategy has become "the one who gets the order wins the world", because the performance, process and consistency of the product need to be tested and improved in countless production practices, and the cost reduction also needs to be achieved through scale effects.
In the future, as the technology of each link becomes more and more mature, the aura of vertical integration gradually fades, and the division of labor and cooperation and open integration of the industrial chain become the way to win. Such an evolution path is also directly reflected in the changes in the pattern of the battery industry.
Although Japan was the first to take lithium batteries out of the laboratory, due to the closure of the industrial system, coupled with the love of hydrogen energy and other reasons, the market share has been being eroded, and the Koreans have achieved "curve overtaking" through the accumulation of basic materials, open supply chains and gambling on on-board batteries, while China has caught up with South Korea with the continuity of policies, the certainty of market demand and strong manufacturing capabilities.
Nowadays, the PK between the two giants of LG and the Ningde era is not limited to a single dimension such as technology, production capacity and orders, but is upgraded to the whole industry chain. In other words: have control over upstream minerals, have confidence in midstream technology, and have a voice in downstream customers.
Power battery is different from the engine, it is a more integrated, more processing links, material costs accounted for 80% of the product, from the most basic lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and other minerals in the upstream, and then to the midstream of the positive electrode, negative electrode, electrolyte and diaphragm four main materials, all need battery factories to have a layout to ensure a stable supply at a reasonable price, in order to promote the cost of continuous decline.
In the midstream sector, LG has long been ahead of its domestic counterparts, thanks to the self-research of key technologies and the self-production of raw materials.
For example, ceramic coated diaphragm technology has been patented in South Korea, Japan, the United States and China, and the barriers are very high, and Zeng Yuqun's former owner ATL was sued by LG in 2017 for this technology.
LG as a whole adopts a global procurement strategy, but still retains part of its production capacity in some key raw materials, such as cathode materials that have the greatest impact on energy density, LG mainly purchases from four companies, South Korea's L&F and ECOPRO, Belgium's Umicore, and Japan's Nichia Chemical, but also produces a part of its own, and the domestic Grammy also supplies a small part.
It can be said that LG is a delicate Boy who grew up eating hamburgers and steaks, compared with a northern man who grew up eating coarse grains and noodles in the Ningde era.
The difference between the two is that the performance of the former is slightly higher, and the cost of the latter is lower, and this difference is also directly reflected in the financial report. Before 2020, the LG battery business has always repeatedly jumped on both sides of profit and loss, while ningde's gross profit margin in the past 5 years has basically remained above 28%, which of course benefits from the domestic industrial chain dividend, which essentially relies on "quantity" to drive "quality".
In May last year, South Korea's JoongAng Ilbo published a survival-hungry article with the title "Materials are not as good as China, and the quality is not as good as Japan: Is South Korea's battery still the world's first?" The article made a SWOT analysis of the competitiveness of the battery industry in China, Japan and South Korea, and the result was that China's advantages in "materials and prices" were particularly prominent.
In 2020, 58% of the world's cathode materials, 66% of the anode materials, 55% of the diaphragm, 72% of the electrolyte, 80% of the lithium battery copper foil are Made in China, and the huge scale effect of this raw material has created a certain cost advantage for downstream domestic battery factories.
In order to change its inferior position in raw materials and prices, LG has been crazy in China in the past three years, such as buying ternary precursors from Huayou Cobalt, buying high-nickel cathode materials from Grimme, buying diaphragms from Enjie, buying electrolytes from Tianci, and investing in domestic copper foil manufacturer Jiujiang Defu last year, covering almost all key materials.
In the past two years, electric vehicles have been hot, power batteries are in short supply, and at this time, as important as cost reduction and expansion, it is also a problem in front of the Ningde era and LG, and it is also a special feature of this industry.
In the era of fuel vehicles, no car company or engine manufacturer will control iron ore or bauxite, but battery factories have to extend their hands to the far end.
On the one hand, this is because lithium, nickel, cobalt these metal elements are unevenly distributed, such as lithium ore is mainly distributed in South America and Australia, nickel is mainly concentrated in Indonesia, the Philippines and Russia, and most of the cobalt is located in the perennial war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Gold), behind the geopolitical complexity, a regime change, a tribal conflict, a volcanic eruption, may bring the price up.
On the other hand, the power battery as a large-scale manufacturing industry, pay attention to continuous production, any raw material supply may lead to the entire production line to stop production, and then affect the customer relationship, so from the perspective of supply assurance, the battery factory as the boss of the entire industrial chain to layout the upstream minerals is not not a business, but a strategic vision of the embodiment.
In the matter of global mining grabs, although there are pioneers such as Tianqi and Ganfeng in China, the overall layout of the Ningde era is later than LG.
Since 2017, LG has locked in huge orders for lithium hydroxide from australian, Canadian and Chinese companies; in 2020, it signed an 8-year lithium salt purchase order with lithium resource giant SQM; in 2021, it obtained an agreement with an Australian company to purchase 7,000 tons of nickel and 700 tons of cobalt per year; this year it purchased 700,000 kilotons of spodumene from Australia, equivalent to 100,000 tons of lithium hydroxide, all before LG was listed.
In contrast, although the Ningde era is more than three years earlier than LG New Energy, it has some hindsight in the layout of upstream minerals and lithium salts. For example, in November 2017, LG had reached an agreement with the Australian mining company Pilbara to jointly build a lithium hydroxide processing plant in South Korea with an annual production capacity of 30,000 tons of lithium hydroxide, while CATL did not take a stake in Pilbara until September 2019, holding about 7% of the shares.
Over the past year, the price of lithium carbonate has soared from more than 100,000 per ton to more than 500,000, downstream manufacturers are walking on thin ice; the empty drama around Tsingshan Holdings has also made "nickel" successful; last year, Musk publicly complained about the shortage of "nickel" on Twitter, and told the world that "as long as environmentally friendly mining, there is no big order", which shows that these upstream resources have become oil, coal and natural gas in the new era.
The struggle for these resources will never end, and although this is not something that can be determined by companies such as CATL and LG, it will inevitably affect the direction of their destiny.
04
End
During Moon's visit to the United States on May 19, 2021, the first stop after getting off the plane was not to go straight to the White House to meet Biden, but to Arlington National Cemetery more than a dozen kilometers away.
In Arlington, Moon made a grand wreath. According to public reports, Moon jae-in expressed to the accompanying U.S. personnel "to pay tribute to the U.S. troops who fought in the Korean War again" and hoped to "work with President Biden to further develop the ROK-U.S. alliance built with blood." You know, Moon jae-in is not an extreme pro-American faction.
Moon Jae-in lays a Wreath, Arlington National Cemetery, 2021
Although the political team is not the same as the industrial team, it will subtly affect the pattern of the industry to a large extent. In the century-old contest between LG and Ningde, on the surface it was a sino-Korean war, but in fact it was a sino-US war. Biden's "china will not win" is not a big sentence, it is a conspiracy to follow.
Shortly after biden was sworn in early last year, he launched a 100-day review of supply chains, including power batteries and semiconductors, followed by the release of the U.S. Lithium Battery Blueprint 2021-2030 in June, which pointed to two of the most intractable problems in the United States: insufficient local battery capacity and lack of upstream mineral resources.
The solution to the first problem is mainly to rely on "not letting the Koreans run away." In fact, that's what Biden did.
In the first half of last year, in response to the patent litigation between LG and SKI, the US International Trade Commission ruled that SKI was in default, requiring SKI to ban the sale of batteries and modules in the United States for ten years, which made SKI furious and threatened to withdraw from the United States and withdraw factories to Europe or China, which made the Biden administration very nervous, because Ford was a big customer of SKI, and after repeated mediation by multiple departments, LG and SKI reached an understanding agreement worth $1.8 billion, and SKI stayed in the United States.
Solving the second problem is not so easy.
The United States lithium, nickel and cobalt resources are very poor, not like oil can basically achieve self-sufficiency, can only rely on Australia, Canada, the Philippines these family mine allies to help, in contrast, China is more precautionary, the world's largest spodumene mines, lithium salt lake, cobalt mines, laterite nickel mines, have Chinese investment.
Biden also realized this problem after taking office. Last November, The New York Times published an article about how the United States missed an opportunity step by step in the battle for cobalt resources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and how China seized the opportunity.
Two months after the article was published, Biden sent a delegation to meet with the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to discuss how the United States could obtain the rare metal, and Daleep Singh, the deputy national security adviser, also took the opportunity to criticize the mining contract between China and Congo as "opaque",[9] and hinted at the other side to strengthen the review of previous contracts.
In essence, the hegemonic position of the United States in the world is based on petrodollars and strong scientific and technological and military strength, but with the rise of new energy vehicles, lithium, cobalt, nickel and other scarce resources are reshaping this pattern, which is undoubtedly a huge challenge and threat for the United States, but for China, it is a barrier that must be passed.
Further, this new energy war, the front line will be very long: the battle will be carried out on the lithium mines in South America and the nickel mines in Southeast Asia, on the chemical formula of the top laboratories, on the vehicle assembly line, in the 12-inch semiconductor fab, on the whitelist and blacklist of industry makers...
The counterattack of a trillion-level industry is not much easier than the rise of an ancient country. The duel on the wheel, why not the national fortune on the wheel?
[1] Biden visited the Ford plant and made a bold statement: China can't win this matter of electric vehicles, electric EVs
[2] Obama attends the groundbreaking ceremony of LG Chemical Battery Factory, Yonhap News Agency
[3] The largest IPO in the history of Korean stocks was born, and the CEO of LG New Energy said that the future will surpass the Ningde era, and unicorns already know
[4] German experts say that South Korea's battery technology is 10 years ahead of the world, and China's energy storage network
[5] South Korea's Samsung and LG are not included in the automotive power battery catalog, Caixin
[6] A lithium battery conspiracy in which a people is still in the dark
[7] New energy vehicle battery policy fog, Caixin
[8] Ending "Ning Wang", LG New Energy is only "a dream" away from the upper position? Longbridge Dolphin Research
[9] China is in trouble in the Dr. Congo at a time of global scramble for cobalt resources, Wall Street Journal
[10] US media: Cobalt mine battle, how the United States lost to China, Observer Network
[11] LG Polish Electric Vehicle Battery Factory Begins Construction to Expand Global Industrial Layout, JoongAng Daily, South Korea
[12] China's new moment of power battery: lithium battery conquest of Japan and South Korea, who is the next generation of battery king, financial magazine
[13] Why A123 Didn't Get the Volt Contract，MIT Technolody Review
Mo Ke, the founder of Mo Ke Guan Lithium, and chen Zhi, an intern, also contributed to this article