When a chemical giant announced it would make battery materials its second core business, the immediate reaction from outsiders was: is it just chasing the next trend? But a closer look at Wanhua Chemical's (600309) moves over the past two years reveals that this is not a simple business expansion, but a revaluation of industrial value based on core chemical capabilities. Amid the triple waves of the dual-carbon strategy, the booming new energy market, and technological iteration, Wanhua Chemical is attempting to tell a unique story of how "chemicals + new energy" can create a chemical reaction.
The Starting Point of the Game: Deconstructing the Pain Points of New Energy with Chemical Thinking
What are the pain points of the new energy industry? Setting aside the dazzling technical jargon, the core issues boil down to two: the "bottleneck" anxiety over upstream resources and green manufacturing across the entire value chain. Wanhua Chemical's approach precisely demonstrates a chemical enterprise's unique logic in addressing these pain points.
First, it secures upstream resources—but not simply by "buying mines." Wanhua has laid out plans for two essential core raw materials, phosphorus and lithium, by taking stakes in phosphate ore and forming deep ties with enterprises such as Xingfa Group. This "chemical + mining" combination builds a secure foundation for raw material supply from the source. This approach stems from Wanhua's deep accumulation over years of experience in the chemical new materials sector and its mastery of the industry chain.
Second comes the "green manufacturing" revolution in the midstream. Wanhua's green electricity industrial parks in Haiyang and Laizhou are equipped with self-supplied clean energy sources such as wind and PV, adopting an integrated "wind-solar-storage-grid-production" model. Producing new energy materials with clean energy is not just a conceptual gimmick—it provides a sustainable model for the industry.
Science and Technology Drive Material Advancement: Advanced R&D Strengthens the Comprehensive Competitive Advantage of the Chemical Industry Chain
Wanhua Chemical's core competitiveness stems from its long-accumulated chemical R&D foundation. Driven by both chemical technology empowerment and diversified innovation mechanisms, it upgrades bulk chemical raw materials to high-value-added battery functional materials, forming differentiated comprehensive competitive advantages.
Wanhua Chemical Group maintains annual R&D investment on the order of billions of yuan, holding a cumulative total of more than 9,600 global invention patents, and its R&D team includes over 4,000 professional researchers. In the battery field, it has built a dedicated R&D team of nearly 1,000 people. Its innovative R&D model takes a parallel approach from chemical engineering (organic chemistry) and materials science (inorganic chemistry), enabling deep cross-disciplinary integration and breakthrough technology development. At the same time, Wanhua precisely recognizes that battery material preparation is a fine chemical process, and it fully replicates its mature engineering capabilities—including process optimization, specialized equipment development, process intensification, and safety production—into battery production. This integrated "chemical + battery" system provides solid support for the battery business and represents a unique development path that is difficult for others in the industry to replicate.
Wanhua continuously iterates in the LFP cathode material field, steadily advancing the technology reserves for next-generation products; in the sodium-ion battery field, it has also made early moves to secure key material positions. More importantly, Wanhua is not limited to cathode and anode materials—it looks at full-scenario supporting products, extending downstream into NMP solvents, battery PACK structural adhesives, battery cell potting sealants, lightweight composite functional materials, and others, forming a full-material matrix covering lithium batteries and sodium-ion batteries, from internal battery cell components to complete vehicle packaging.
Typical battery material manufacturers may focus on only one or two major categories, but Wanhua, leveraging its advantages across the entire chemical industry chain, can provide complete material solutions covering different technology routes. As industry insiders have observed, Wanhua's unique feature is not just production line expansion, but the transfer of its accumulated capabilities in "fine chemicals + engineering + global supply chain" from the chemical new materials field to the battery track, forming a distinctive playbook.
Long-Term Strategic Focus
We must acknowledge that this transformation is not an overnight process. Data shows that while Wanhua Chemical's profit in H1 2026 approached 10 billion yuan, its subsidiary focusing on battery materials was still in a period of phased investment in 2025. However, when we consider Wanhua Chemical's positioning of battery materials as its second core business and its goal of long-term development in the new energy industry, we should not judge solely by current financial figures.
Wanhua Chemical's strategic transformation reflects the trend in China's manufacturing sector from scale expansion toward increasing technological value-added. While strengthening its core chemical new materials business, it has entered the new energy track, replicating and extending the mature systems of technology development, integrated industry chain, and park-based production operations accumulated over the long term in the chemical sector to new business segments, creating new growth drivers. With its deep R&D foundation and integrated industrial operation capabilities, Wanhua's industrialisation practice in new energy materials can drive industrial upgrades in upstream raw material support, process engineering, stable mass production, and other links, providing a new path reference for the industrial development of the entire new energy materials industry. Its business synergy layout has medium and long-term observability.
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