Chinese Battery Giant CATL Raises $6.7 Billion in Share Sale

CATL, the world’s largest maker of electric-vehicle batteries, issued new shares to investors including two units of JPMorgan Chase & Co., a unit of Morgan Stanley, and Barclays Bank PLC.

This is the second-largest share sale this year, beaten only by the $10.6 billion initial public offering in January of another EV battery maker,

LG Energy Solution Ltd.

of South Korea, according to Dealogic. Another important industry player, the Chinese lithium producer

Tianqi Lithium Corp.

, is preparing to sell more than $1 billion of stock in what would be Hong Kong’s largest IPO this year.

So far this year, global issuance in the equity capital markets has crashed 69% to $251.8 billion, with IPO proceeds down 73%, Dealogic says. However, China’s domestic equity markets, in Shanghai and Shenzhen, have bucked the broader trend.

CATL raised about 45 billion yuan, equivalent to $6.71 billion, in a heavily oversubscribed deal, it said in a filing late Wednesday. CATL, which is based in Ningde, a city in the southeastern province of Fujian, said it would use some of the proceeds to boost production at several locations in China.

In total, CATL sold 109.8 million shares at 410 yuan apiece. That was substantially lower than the recent traded prices of its shares, which closed Wednesday at 507 yuan. Last year, the battery manufacturer initially said it planned to raise as much as 58.2 billion yuan, or about $8.7 billion at current exchange rates, but in November it reduced the size of the deal.

CATL’s stock hit a record high in December, giving it a market value of nearly $250 billion, as electric-car sales surged in China and investor appetite for leading companies in the market boomed. But the shares have since been buffeted by concerns including rising raw materials costs, geopolitical tensions and disruptions to China’s car market caused by the country’s pandemic curbs.

Shares in CATL rose 5.9% in Shenzhen on Thursday, trimming their year-to-date loss to about 8.7%, and giving the company a market capitalization of about $185 billion.

The company is a key supplier of lithium-ion batteries to electric-vehicle makers such as Tesla and

NIO Inc.

It had about 29% of the global EV battery market by units sold last year, followed by LG Energy’s 22%, according to SNE Research.

Write to Yifan Wang at [email protected]