NCA cathode material market potential is huge, but domestic production and sales are small at this stage

The performance of cathode materials directly determines the energy density of lithium-ion batteries. Due to its high specific energy, high specific power, and low cobalt content, ternary cathode materials have become the leading product of cathode materials for new energy vehicle power batteries. Ternary cathode materials include two categories: NCM cathode materials and NCA cathode materials. NCM is composed of nickel, cobalt, and manganese, and NCA is composed of nickel, cobalt, and aluminum. At this stage, in my country’s ternary cathode material market, NCM cathode materials occupy a dominant position, and NCA cathode materials have broad market space.

According to the “2021-2025 NCA Cathode Materials Industry In-depth Market Research and Investment Strategy Suggestion Report” released by the Industrial Research Center, the Driven by the need to reduce costs and increase cruising range, the development trend of high-nickel ternary cathode materials is obvious, and NCM811 is a representative product. Compared with NCM811, NCA has a lower cycle life, but NCM811, like most batteries, must be charged and discharged frequently to ensure its service life, while NCA can still guarantee its service life when placed for a long time and in standby mode. And compared with NCM811, NCA uses less cobalt and has lower cost. From this point of view, NCA cathode materials have huge development potential.

NCA cathode materials have high technical barriers, strict requirements on the production environment and preparation process, and are also stringent when manufacturing batteries, and the safety of NCA batteries has declined. Therefore, NCM batteries are in a dominant position in the Chinese market. With the continuous advancement of technology and continuous improvement of processes, the safety of NCA batteries is expected to continue to improve. In 2018, Panasonic and Tesla jointly launched the 21700 NCA battery, whose energy density is significantly higher than NCM811. Therefore, the research and development of NCA cathode materials is necessary Sexual prominence.

Globally, NCA cathode material production capacity is mainly concentrated in Japan and South Korea. Representative production companies include Japan’s Sumitomo, Japan Chemical, Japan’s Toda, South Korea’s Ecopro, South Korea’s GSEM, etc. Japan is the world’s largest producer of NCA cathode materials with advanced technology. The NCA batteries produced by Panasonic use NCA cathode materials produced by Sumitomo. At this stage, our country has broken through the technical bottleneck of NCA cathode materials and can carry out large-scale production, but the output is relatively small.

my country’s NCA cathode material R&D and production companies mainly include GEM, Fangyuan Co., Ltd., Tianjin Bamo, Dangsheng Technology, etc. Among them, GEM and Fangyuan Co., Ltd. can supply NCA cathode materials in batches. In 2019, NCA cathode materials accounted for about 12% of my country’s ternary cathode material shipments. my country has already produced NCA batteries from companies such as Lishen Battery and Tianpeng Power Supply. However, the overall output of domestic NCA batteries is small, and a large part of NCA cathode materials are exported to overseas markets.

Industry analysts said that in the short term, NCM occupies a dominant position in my country’s ternary cathode material market, but there are already companies in my country It has the capacity to produce NCA cathode materials in batches. With the development of high-nickel ternary cathode materials, the market space of NCM811 and NCA has increased. Since NCA cathode materials have higher energy density and more stable long-term storage life, their market share is expected to continue to expand in the future as the technology becomes increasingly mature. In the long term, NCM811 and NCA cathode materials are expected to become the mainstream products of my country’s ternary cathode materials.