China’s “dreamchild” is stealthily winning the battery race
中国“梦之子”悄然引领电池竞赛
In America, if you want to dominate an industry, you channel your inner Elon Musk and shout about it. But CATL, the Chinese company that makes batteries for some of Mr Musk’s Tesla electric vehicles (EVs), is different. When your columnist first contacted it in 2017, the brush-off was swift.
在美国，如果你想主宰一个行业，你就得调动自己内心的埃隆·马斯克并大声咆哮。但为马斯克的部分特斯拉电动汽车供应电池的中国公司宁德时代则不同。当笔者在2017年第一次与该公司取得联系时，对方直接拒绝了我们的采访。
“We want to concentrate on our products only and do not accept any interviews at present.” These days it is only marginally less blunt. “Unfortunately, we are sorry that it’s hard for us to arrange [interviews] at the moment.” The temptation is to give it a dose of its own medicine and ignore it.
“我们只想专注于我们的产品，目前不接受任何采访。”如今，该公司的态度没有过去那么生硬了，但也只是稍微缓和。“很抱歉，目前恕难安排（采访）。”真是让人想要以牙还牙，再也不与之联系。
And yet in 2017 the firm, founded only six years earlier as Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd, vaulted from being the world’s third-largest battery-maker to its biggest.
然而，在2017年，成立仅仅6年的宁德时代从世界第三大电池制造商一跃成为全球最大的电池制造商。
It has since reached a market value of 1.3trn yuan ($200bn), more than the second, third and fourth producers—South Korea’s LG Chem, Japan’s Panasonic, and China’s BYD—combined. In recent days its rising share price has made its 53-year-old founder, Zeng Yuqun, richer than Jack Ma, a much-better-known Chinese tech baron.
自那以后，该公司的市值不断攀升，目前已达1.3万亿人民币（约合2000亿美元），超过了位列第二、第三和第四的电池制造商韩国 LG 化学、日本松下和中国比亚迪的总和。近日，随着股价的不断上涨，现年53岁的创始人曾毓的身家烟超过了更知名的中国科技大亨马云。
Mr Zeng created it in the backwater of Ningde, a subtropical city better known for tea than tech, in Fujian province where he grew up in a hillside village. But he has long had high ambitions. In 1999 he founded Amperex Technology Ltd (ATL), a maker of lithium-ion batteries for portable devices, which he sold to TDK, a Japanese firm, in 2005. One of his big clients was Apple, maker of the iPhone.
曾毓在福建的山村里长大，在穷乡僻壤宁德市（一座亚热带城市，以茶叶而非科技闻名）创办了这家公司。但他一直心怀理想。1999年，他创立了新能源科技有限公司，一家生产便携式设备用锂离子电池的公司，并于2005年将该公司卖给了日本 TDK 公司。当时，他的大客户之一便是 iPhone 手机的制造商苹果公司。
Seeing the potential for EV batteries, which China was keen to turn into a strategic industry, Mr Zeng led a spin off from ATL in 2011, severing links with its Japanese parent company—possibly to please the Chinese authorities, says Mark Newman, a battery executive who formerly covered the company as an investment analyst.
中国正努力将动力电池打造为一个战略产业，曾毓看到了其中的潜力，他在2011年将该业务从 ATL 剥离出来，切断了与日本母公司的联系，曾担任该公司投资分析师的电池行业高管马克·纽曼表示，此举或许也是为了取悦当局。
When it listed in 2018, CATL had a small percentage of direct and indirect state ownership. More important, the government had its back. For years China used subsidies to favour domestically produced batteries for electric cars and buses, kneecapping South Korean competitors such as LG Chem and Sams
ung SDI.
宁德时代在2018年上市时，政府也通过直接和间接方式持有少部分股份。更重要的是，政府是其坚实的后盾。多年来，中国一直利用补贴政策对国产电动汽车和大巴用电池提供支持，令 LG 化学和三星 SDI 等韩国竞争对手举步维艰。
CATL, one of two top-tier Chinese producers, benefited most. The other, BYD, made cars as well as batteries. For that reason, many rival carmakers in China—including foreigners such as Tesla and BMW—gave it a wide berth and turned to Mr Zeng instead.
作为中国两家顶级动力电池制造商之一的宁德时代受益最大。另一家公司比亚迪同时生产电池和电动汽车。出于这个原因，许多在中国的竞争对手车企（包括特斯拉和宝马等外国汽车制造商）对其敬而远之，转而向曾毓采购电池。
It is unfair, however, to ascribe CATL’s success purely to economic nationalism. According to James Frith of BloombergNEF, a consultancy, when CATL was faced with the winding down of subsidies in 2019, it quickly leapfrogged its South Korean rivals to produce the latest high-nickel batteries, which run for longer than the cheaper lithium-iron-phosphate ones that had been China’s staple.
然而，将宁德时代的成功完全归因于经济民族主义是不公平的。据彭博新能源咨询公司的詹姆斯·弗里思称，在2019年面临补贴逐渐减少的问题时，宁德时代赶在了韩国竞争对手之前推出了最新的高镍电池，其续航时间要比中国当时主流的价格更低的磷酸铁锂电池更长。
特斯拉股价
Chinese carmakers are bolder than their Western counterparts (apart from Tesla) in adopting innovative chemistry, he adds, which gives CATL more freedom to experiment. It also gets more for its investment in China than rivals do elsewhere and has a cheaper workforce, which makes its operating margins, just shy of 15%, the best in the business.
他补充道，中国汽车制造商在采用创新化学技术方面比西方同行（特斯拉除外）更大胆，这给了宁德时代更多试验的机会。相比竞争对手在其他市场的投资收益，宁德时代在中国的投资收益也更高，而且还拥有更廉价的劳动力，这使得其经营利润率达到了15%，是业内最高的。
Strong profits provide more cash to invest in expansion. Neil Beveridge of Bernstein, an investment firm, expects its capacity roughly to quadruple to 500 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of battery cells a year by 2025. That is an amount similar to what is promised from all of the world’s gigafactories today.