Following the resonant reaction of new energy stocks with the sharp drop in CATL's stock price last week, CATL continued its implementation of battery deployment, while XPeng revealed information on the adjustment of its supply chain.

On 23 December, an article featuring the unbalanced supply chain between CATL and automotive manufacturers went viral online. This article said that XPeng, Guangzhou Automobile and other auto companies have escaped from CATL's control and have been looking for other suppliers, coming to the conclusing that CATL has too much power in the supply chain and is behind in new technology R&D. 

The stock of CATL went down by about 7% right after the spread of this article and was affecting other related stocks since CATL is an influential company in the industry. 

On 24 December, in response to the rumours that XPeng intends to introduce Calb-tech as its new major lithium-ion battery supplier, staff from XPeng stated: "The supply chain of vehicle parts and components needs to be continuously improved to better guarantee supply and production, as well as to better predict the delivery cycles." 

In fact, the friction on battery supply between XPeng and CATL started years ago as XPeng's staffs allegedly received threatening emails from CATL on battery supply. It escalated recently as lithium iron phosphate batteries are in tight supply in the market, which created uncertainty on the delivery of XPeng's P7 model. Currently, CATL's capacity utilisation rate exceeds 90% for competitive battery types, and it requires automakers to buy out production lines to obtain a stable supply of batteries.

CATL has been working on its scheduled projects as usual. On 24 December, CATL's battery production base project was launched in Guizhou as planned.  Targeting both power and energy storage batteries, the first phase of the project covers about 885 acres of land, with a designed annual production capacity of 30 gigawatt hours.Outside of the main venue in Gui'an New Distrct, other projects involving LIFSI, lithium hexafluorophosphate and iron phosphate were also launched, Kallanish learns.