After several years development, the global Li-ion battery industry has been monopolized evenly by China, Japan and South Korea. This pattern will last for quite a long time since each of the three countries has its own characteristics and advantages. In recent years, China has made great achievements in Li-ion battery industrialization. It has formed a complete industry chain from upstream products, raw material manufacturing, equipment manufacturing, battery processing, export trade and downstream products. According to us, the number of Li-ion battery manufacturers has exceeded 100 in China, among which Shenzhen BYD, BAK and Tianjin Lishen have became the major battery manufacturers worldwide, with an annual output over 600 million units. As a large consumption country of Li-ion battery, as well as abundant labor force and raw materials, China has became the final destination for multinational Li-ion battery manufacturers, such as Sony, Panasonic, and Sanyo, etc. Consequently, China has developed to be an important global Li-ion battery production base.
By 2006, color display phone has dominated the market. Along with frequent appearance of camera phone and multimedia phone, functions of photo shooting, receiving and sending multimedia messages, and downloading high-capacity games are used more and more often. However, in facing with more powerful 3G mobile phones, battery capacity is obviously insufficient. Mobile phone battery tends to be lighter, thinner and higher capacity. Various new battery types such as fuel cell, Zinc-air and solar cell are under the R & D process.
Regarding LIP, there are around ten competent manufacturers, among which the major foreign manufacturers are Sony, Samsung and LG, while that of China are TCL and ATL.
As we all know, China has an abundant and cheap labor force. Therefore, many Chinese manufacturers adopt low-cost competitive strategy by using labor-oriented semi-automatic production lines. The build cost of a single Li-ion full-automatic production line in Japan is several times or even dozens of times of that in China. Currently, some Chinese Li-ion manufacturers have caught up with the counterparts in Korea and Japan, for example, BYD and Lishen rank top five and top ten respectively on production capabilities worldwide.
From 2003 to 2006, the CAGR of the global Li-ion battery production scale will reach 23.2%, and the CAGR of sales revenue will reach 12.25%. From 2007 to 2010, Li-ion battery industry will gradually enter into a steady growing period. According to us, the CAGR of production scale and the CAGR of sales revenue will be 9.85% and 5.85% respectively by then. In a word, the mobile phone battery market is not only a potentially huge market, but an effective and sustainable market.
The sales revenue of Li-ion battery has exceeded that of Ni-Cd and NI-MH Battery. With the market for Ni-Cd and NI-MH Battery shrinking, the popularity of consumer electronic products and mobile electronic products such as mobile phone, digital camera, PDA and camcorder etc, as well as the huge application potentials of Li-ion battery, the market demand of Li-ion will increase with a relatively rapid growth rate in the future.
