According to EV Sales Blog, there’s huge progress in lithium-ion battery production for electric cars – production growth of approximately 54% year-over-year to more than 7,000 MWh in 2014. The numbers comes from car sales data and assumptions of kWh used by different plug-in models.
Panasonic remains the clear leader (38% market share) thanks to 35,000 Tesla Model S EVs sold with the largest battery packs in the industry. Panasonic gets a slight boost too from growing deliveries to other manufacturers like Volkswagen.
Growth of Panasonic is rapid – 60%, but Chinese company BYD is moving at an even quicker clip – 290% up! BYD, with its electric buses and cars, is still far behind the leaders (461 MWh versus 2,726 MWh for Panasonic).
In the top three we see AESC (Nissan and NEC JV), which grew by almost 26% to 1,620 MWh and LG Chem, which had a hard year – up just 9% to 886 MWh.
Lithium Energy Japan (Mitsubishi and GS Yuasa JV) produced some 451 MWh (up by 54%).
BMW supplier Samsung seems to be at #6 with 314 MWh.
Year 2015 probably will launch lithium-ion battery production for plug-in cars beyond 10,000 MWh or 10 GWh.
