The Ningde-based Chinese battery manufacturer CATL is strengthening its position in the European market by opening a new plant in Arnstadt, eastern Germany. CATL has more than 80,000 employees world-wide. Its European affiliate, CATG, was established in Munich in 2014 and the technology unit, CATT, in Erfurt in 2018.
The Thuringia plant – CATL’s first production unit outside China – was established in close cooperation with the nearby Battery Innovation and Technology Centre (BITC), operated by Germany’s renowned Fraunhofer institute. It is Europe’s largest application-orientated research organisation.
BITC will assist CATL in both destructive and non-destructive testing to study how batteries change their properties during their life cycle. The cooperation was established in 2020.
Part of the Arnstadt plant was completed last autumn. The first batch of lithium-ion batteries was produced there during December 2022. Serial production is being ramped up during 2023. The total number of employees will exceed 2,000. At full capacity the factory will produce 30 million battery cells annually, enough for 350,000 EVs with a 40 kWh battery.
CATL will invest €1.8 billion ($1.1 billion) into the production facilities, enabling a total annual output of 14 GWh. This will be a sister unit to a plant in Debrecen in Hungary, where CATL will produce cylindrical batteries similar to Tesla’s recent industrial standard for the new generation of EV cars, “Neue Klasse”, by BMW.
The Sino-German cooperation has mighty figures. Robin Zheng, the chairman of CATL, was invited to join China’s prime minister Li Qiang during his visit in Germany in June 2023. The visit was a step towards deeper co-operation with leading German and French car makers and to lift the ambitions of CATL to advance the electrification of European public transport. CATL holds a 30% market share of e-bus batteries in Europe.