Chinese Battery Makers Now Supply Almost Three Quarters of the World’s EVs

Seven of the world’s ten biggest EV battery suppliers are now Chinese companies, and together they account for 72.8% of everything installed globally this year.

That figure comes from SNE Research, the South Korean firm that tracks battery installations across the industry every month. Its latest count covers January through July 2026, and the headline number is 725.2 GWh installed worldwide, up 20.4% on the same period last year. July alone added 116.0 GWh, up 22.1% year on year.

CATL remains the company everyone else is chasing. It installed 289.6 GWh across the seven months, up 26.6% year on year, taking its global share to 39.9%, just short of the symbolic 40% mark and unchanged from where it stood at the end of June. BYD held onto second place with 106.7 GWh, but its growth slowed to just 4.7% year on year, and its share slipped to 14.7% from 16.9% a year earlier. Between them, CATL and BYD still supply more than half the world’s EV batteries, at a combined 54.6%, though that combined figure is actually down slightly from 54.9% a year ago as CATL pulls further ahead of its closest rival rather than the pair growing together.

South Korea’s LG Energy Solution held third place with 60.3 GWh, supplying Tesla, Hyundai, GM and Volkswagen among others, though its share fell to 8.3% from 9.6% as its growth trailed the wider market. Two smaller Chinese manufacturers had a stronger few months: CALB moved up to 5.1% share on 37.3 GWh, up 34.3% year on year, and Gotion High-tech climbed to 4.7% share on 34.0 GWh, up 44.2%. Panasonic held sixth place with 26.2 GWh, still leaning heavily on Tesla’s North American sales, while Eve Energy posted the fastest growth of any established top 10 name, up 53.1% year on year to 25.0 GWh.

SK On was the one company in the top ten to actually shrink, with installations down 9.8% year on year to 22.3 GWh and its share falling to 3.1% from 4.1%. At the bottom of the table, Rept Battero Energy more than doubled its installations, up 118.5% to 16.9 GWh, enough to enter the top ten for the first time and push Sunwoda out of the tenth spot entirely.

What stands out most in this data set isn’t any single company’s number, it’s the regional split underneath all of it. Battery installations grew 29.3% in Europe and 16.6% in China, while markets across Asia outside China jumped 77.1% and South America grew 192.6% from a small base. North America went the other way entirely, down 20.2%, as battery electric vehicles’ share of new car sales in the US fell to around 6% following the expiry of federal EV tax credits at the end of last September. Europe’s continued growth here lines up with what I covered in Chinese EV brands in Europe: who’s staying and who’s already gone, where the manufacturers behind these battery numbers are the same names increasingly present on European roads.

CATL’s lead is also becoming harder to separate from where the technology itself is heading. My piece on the next generation battery race between sodium ion and solid state covers why CATL and its Chinese peers are pushing so hard on chemistry beyond standard lithium ion, and CATL’s own move to bring sodium ion technology to Europe through Alfen, which I wrote about here, shows the same company extending its lead in installations while also trying to set the terms for what comes after lithium ion.

Featured Image: CATL