Robin Zeng spent US$6 billion on a nickel mine in Indonesia. A year later a rival at home took 150,000 orders for a car whose battery uses no nickel at all.
Why a battery maker wanted a mine in the first place goes back to the start of his career.
Robin Zeng studied shipbuilding at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, not chemistry. His first engineering job was at SAE Magnetics, a Dongguan subsidiary of Japan’s TDK, where he made engineering director before he turned thirty.
In 1999 he left to start his own battery company, ATL, in Hong Kong. Four years later his engineers solved a defect that had stalled every competing lithium-polymer cell: a chemistry that could recharge hundreds of times without swelling inside its own casing.
Apple noticed. ATL supplied the battery inside the first iPod.
TDK bought ATL in 2005 and kept Zeng running it. In 2011 he split the electric-vehicle battery unit out of ATL into a new company and named it after his hometown: Contemporary Amperex Technology, CATL, set up in Ningde, a Fujian fishing town his family had never left.
Fifteen years later CATL makes close to half the battery capacity going into the world’s electric cars. Zeng no longer wants to depend on somebody else’s mine the way he once depended on somebody else’s chemistry.
On 29 June 2025, in Karawang, West Java, Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto broke ground on the Indonesia Battery Integration Project. A CATL subsidiary, Ningbo Contemporary Brunp Lygend, holds the venture alongside Indonesia’s state miner Antam and the state-owned Indonesia Battery Corporation.
The plan runs the whole chain. Nickel dug and smelted on Halmahera island, cells assembled in Karawang, the waste recycled back into new batteries. Total commitment: roughly US$6 billion.
The Karawang plant’s first phase targets 6.9 gigawatt-hours a year, with room to grow toward 15.
It is the same instinct that fixed the iPod battery, run at industrial scale: never let a supplier’s failure become the company’s own failure.
The chain has already slipped once. Reporting in August 2026 put first output back to late 2026 and full capacity out to 2031, years past the project’s original ambition. BMW, Volkswagen and Volvo are meanwhile diversifying their cell sourcing away from Indonesian nickel, citing environmental and governance risk in the very supply chain CATL is racing to finish.
A mine takes a decade to pay back. A price war does not wait.
A mine takes a decade to pay back. A price war does not wait.
A bigger threat to the whole bet arrived from a domestic rival. In July 2026, BYD said its nickel-free Datang SUV had drawn roughly 150,000 pre-orders in under two months, on a chemistry that needs none of the metal CATL just spent six billion dollars mining.
CATL is fighting on a second front at home. It opened 2025 by suing its state-backed rival CALB for 150 million yuan across two patent cases. CALB countersued for just over 1 billion yuan across four, the largest naming CATL and a Tesla sales entity in Wuhan over a liquid-cooled battery module.
Competition should be fought in technology, long-term value, sustainability, safety and reliability, not on the invoice.
Zeng has said the quiet part in public before. At the 2024 Summer Davos forum he told Chinese carmakers and suppliers to stop cutting prices and start competing on reliability instead.
Competition should be fought “in terms of technology, long-term value, sustainability as well as safety and reliability,” he said, not on the invoice.
Two years later the invoice is still where the industry fights.
CATL’s own numbers show a company winning, not one under siege. Market value passed 2 trillion yuan in April 2026, and 2025 net profit rose 42 percent to 72.2 billion yuan.
Zeng is building the Indonesia mine anyway. He watched a downstream product go from margin to commodity once, at ATL, and means to control the raw-material side of his own business before somebody else does.1
Karawang’s cell line is due to report its first commercial output before this year closes, the one date in the whole chain CATL has already promised. Expect it to hold.
Zeng cannot afford a second slip while BMW, Volkswagen and Volvo are pricing an exit from a supply chain he is still building. A man who spent six billion dollars proving he does not depend on other people’s mines cannot be the one caught depending on his own excuses.
Footnotes
-
CATL’s own materials and contemporary coverage give the ATL-to-CATL spinoff as 2011; some later retrospectives say 2012, an inconsistency the company has never bothered to correct. ↩