CATL will further develop its current 700 kilometer range battery, the new lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery was presented on Thursday. Világgazdaság writes that the range of the new action of the Chinese battery manufacturer will be more than a thousand kilometers on a single charge. According to Gao Huan, Technology Director of CATL’s Electric Vehicle Division, Shenxing Plus is the world’s first LFP battery capable of such a range.
LFP batteries are less harmful to the environment than lithium-ion versions. This type of development may be important for China in order to increase its independence and reduce its exposure to other raw materials (e.g. nickel, manganese, cobalt). Currently, four car models use the Shenxing battery with a range of seven hundred kilometers, and more than fifty models will be equipped with it by the end of the year.
At the end of last year, CATL posted the first quarterly profit drop since 2022, and between January and March this year, profits have already increased again. CATL is also present in Hungary, the company known as the world’s largest battery manufacturer bought two hundred hectares of land near Debrecen to build a factory. The factory building can be erected by István Garancsi’s company, and the Hungarian state is spending hundreds of billions of HUF to serve the infrastructural needs of the plant, for example, the water utility and the transmission network are also being developed. There is a serious protest at the local level in relation to the battery industry developments in Debrecen, and the citizens have also challenged the investment in court.
Hungary is becoming a major power in the battery industry. Increasing the importance of the sector is in line with the geopolitical and global economic strategy of the Orbán government, but many fear that this will only put the Hungarian economy on another forced path. We examined the arguments and counterarguments from an economic point of view in a three-part series of articles:
Our articles dealing with the rise of battery production in Hungary can be read here.
