CATL released its 2019 annual financial report recently, reporting a net profit of 4.356 billion yuan (~US$628 million), a year-on-year increase of 28.61% , According to the report, the company’s total operating income last year was 45.546 billion yuan, a 53.81% increase on year-on-year.
The company enumerated three reasons for its growth last year. One, the increased demand for battery power accelerated the development of the new energy vehicle industry. Two, this has strengthened market development and initial capacity while hiking up production and sales volume. Third, cost control was optimized and costs to revenue proportion was brought down.
Total assets of the CATL reached 101.482 billion yuan by yearend of 2019, a 37.35% increase from 2018 while the owner’s equity attributable to shareholders of listed companies was pegged at 37.741 billion yuan. The increase in total assets was attributed to the expansion of operating scale brought about by the growth of the new energy vehicle market, the company’s fixed assets, monetary funds and long-term investments.
2019 was especially auspicious for CATL, winning multiple orders from car companies. In February of last year, Honda announced plans to purchase 58GWh capacity batteries from CATL for seven years for use in models sold worldwide. Also in the same month, CATL signed a strategic cooperation agreement with BAIC New Energy for supplying power battery system products in the next five years.
In May of last year, the company signed up with Volvo Cars for power batteries in Volvo’s new generation electric models as well as models sold under Polestar. CATL and LG Chem jointly became Volvo’s supplier of power battery orders.
In June 2019, CATL, Hello Bike and Ant Financial made the announcement of a joint investment of 1 billion yuan to launch power exchange service to serve two-wheeled electric motocycle.
By November 2019, Tesla announced the procurement of CATL batteries for use in the production of Model 3 China version.
