As we approach the Chinese New Year holidays, different battery companies have different arrangements for vacation dates. For some enterprises, the vacation time is concentrated between the statutory dates, but the vacation arrangements for different bases are also different. Some bases of individual enterprises also exist without vacation.
However, some enterprises started their vacation at the end of January due to their own production arrangements for orders and production lines, and their expectations for the start of work in February were also scheduled after February 20th.
From the actual January production situation, some battery companies intend to start the production for their order of February in advance in January. Therefore, in January's off-season market, the battery production of some enterprises remained flat compared with December. However, considering some other companies started their vacation at the end of January, SMM expects the actual battery output in January to drop by around 5% YoY compared with December.
The different timing of the February vacation is also indicative of the current polarization in the industry. For example, for Company A in the above picture, most of the company's bases were closed during legal holidays. The end dates are also spread between February 11th and 18th. For Enterprise D, the company was on vacation in the last week of January, and there is no expectation of resuming production by the end of February due to light orders. When talking about the production scheduling, as some enterprise vacation days are more than the statutory holidays, and part of the production order has already been produced in advance in January, SMM expects February production will decline at about 5% -10% compared to January.
From the perspective of terminal energy storage market, the current demand is still relatively cold. No obvious change in end demand makes the enterprise utilization rate remain at a low point. And the panic restocking sentiment brought by the Red Sea situation has also ended. Due to the European distributors more than 2 months of energy storage cell inventory, making the urgency of shipping transportation weakened, short-term replenishment demand is stable for the time being. Domestic energy storage market in the first quarter is the traditional off-season, we expecte overall market demand in Q1 of the probability of a large rebound is low.
And in terms of EV side, In december car enterprises focused on the volume which made car sales in January decline is really obvious. At present, thecar enterprises have already announced the sales of the fourth week of January. In the previous four weeks, the first 10 new force car makers sales is 125,400 units, declined by 27.26% MoM, the first 6 traditional car makers sales is 291,500 units, decline by 35.03% MoM. The impact of the traditional off-season also makes cell makers arrange production based on the sales. And due to the price of raw materials recently slight rise, some battery companies switched their order for March in advance to January and February, making the post-holiday demand is expected to be relatively weak.
For more detailed information, please contact: cathycai@smm.cn
