How China is cornering the market for electric-car batteries

The West is sleepwalking into a situation where it has traded its old reliance on Middle East oil for dependence on key metals controlled by China. That’s a bad trade, says Simon Wilson

Raw cobalt on a conveyor
Most of DR Congo's cobalt is destined for export to China
(Image credit: © SAMIR TOUNSI/AFP via Getty Images)

As the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) begins in earnest, a battery “arms race” is underway, and China is in pole position. A range of factors – including tightening emissions rules, earlier bans on internal-combustion models, and consumer incentives – are driving EV sales faster than expected, especially in China and Europe. Morgan Stanley’s auto team now projects 40% of new car sales globally will be EVs by 2030 – meaning annual production of 36 million electric cars within eight years, up from around four million in 2021.

China is already easily the world’s biggest market for EVs with total sales of 1.3 million vehicles in 2020, more than 40% of global sales that year. But it is also becoming the dominant player in battery production. And the EV market’s rapid expansion is increasingly focusing attention on the raw materials – lithium, nickel and cobalt, as well as rare earth metals – needed to make EV batteries.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.