Dangsheng Science and Technology join hands with Weilan New Energy to seize the commanding height of solid-state battery technology.

Dangsheng Technology (300073.SZ), the leading company of lithium cathode materials in China, issued a notice on December 7, 2021, announcing that it had signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Beijing Weilan New Energy Technology Co., Ltd., the domestic leader in solid-state lithium battery industrialization, and the two sides decided to establish a multi-level and omni-directional strategic partnership in solid-state lithium battery product supply, technology development and capacity layout. Weilan New Energy regards Dangsheng Technology as the preferred supplier of solid-state battery materials and promises to purchase no less than 25000 tons of solid-state lithium cathode materials from Dangsheng Technology from 2022 to 2025. At the same time, in terms of new product development and cutting-edge technical cooperation, Weilan New Energy will give priority to the products of Dangsheng technology for the supporting development of new models of solid-state power batteries or new battery projects in other fields. The two sides agreed to strengthen exchanges and cooperation in the fields of lithium electricity cutting-edge technology, such as high-nickel multi-materials, lithium-rich manganese-based materials, lithium cobalt, lithium iron phosphate, lithium manganese iron phosphate, and so on. In the future, we will actively carry out a feasibility study on the joint investment of both sides in the construction of solid-state lithium power and its key materials production base.

With the rapid growth of the global new energy vehicle industry, power battery technology is also upgrading rapidly. In addition to further improving the energy ratio of the mainstream lithium iron phosphate battery and ternary lithium battery in the market, the solid-state battery with higher energy ratio, better performance and safer is regarded as the development direction of the next generation power battery technology. At present, the leading players in the automobile power battery market are mainly Chinese, Japanese and Korean enterprises. In the field of ternary lithium battery and lithium iron phosphate battery, China's power battery material structure innovation is in the forefront of the world, with technical and market advantages. However, with the progress and development of technology, the commercialization of solid-state batteries is likely to bring about a reshuffle of the market, which will also bring huge commercial prospects. Countries such as Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea, where the electric car battery market has lagged behind Chinese companies, have taken this as an opportunity to catch up.

According to the report of Battery China, China's solid-state battery shipments will grow rapidly from 2020 to 2030, and may exceed 250GWH by 2030. The global solid-state battery market space is expected to reach more than 150 billion yuan in 2030. Therefore, the next 5-10 years will be an important window for the development of the solid-state battery industry, and the main task of enterprises will be to devote themselves to research and development in order to achieve the goal of putting related products on the market more quickly.

In recent years, a number of battery companies and automobile companies in Europe and the United States, Japan and South Korea have been carrying out solid-state battery business layout. Among them, Toyota plans to achieve small-scale mass production of all-solid-state batteries in 2025 and sustained and stable mass production of all-solid-state batteries by 2030. Nissan plans to launch an electric model with original all-solid-state batteries by 2028 and plans to build a pilot plant in Yokohama, Japan, in 2024. European and American car companies lay out their business by investing in head start-ups and continue to increase their investment. As early as 2018, Volkswagen Group invested US $100 million in Quantum Scape, an American solid-state battery company, and partnered to invest an additional $200 million in 2020. The company went public in September 2020, and Volkswagen owns 31.05% of its class A shares. GM participated in the B-round financing of Solid Energy Systems (SES), an American solid-state battery company, in 2018. In April 2021, SES completed a $139 million financing from D-round, led by General Motors. In May 2021, BMW and Ford announced a joint investment of $139 million in solid-state battery startup Solid Power, and in December, Daimler and Stellantis said they would make a strategic investment and business partnership with solid-state battery maker Factorial Energy. In terms of domestic car companies, the soon-to-be-listed ET7 will carry semi-solid batteries on production cars for the first time, thus gradually opening the marketization of semi-solid batteries and solid-state batteries. At present, auto companies including SAIC, Great Wall Automobile, Xilai and BAIC New Energy have begun to take relevant actions. SAIC has carried out strategic cooperation with solid-state battery start-ups such as Quantum Scape, Solid Energy and Qingtao; Honeycomb Energy, a subsidiary of Great Wall Motor, has also put forward a very specific solid-state battery technology development plan; and Xilai announced that it will mass-produce the ET7, this year as the company's first solid-state battery product. Weilan New Energy, founded in 2016, is the industrialization platform of solid-state battery technology in the Clean Energy Laboratory of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Qixinbao shows that Weilan New Energy has completed a financing round of about 500 million yuan, with investors including Xiaomi Group, Huawei Technology, IDG Capital, Lurai Capital and Yuntai Capital. After this round of financing, Weilan New Energy is valued at 5 billion yuan.

The establishment of a strategic cooperation relationship between the company and Weilan New Energy will help to speed up the market-oriented application and batch sales of the company's solid-state battery materials, seize the commanding heights of the next generation power battery technology, realize the company's strategic layout in the solid-state battery field, establish the company's leading edge in the solid-state battery field, and create new growth points for the company's future business development.