On January 26, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited(CATL), a Chinese battery manufacturer, opened its first factory in Europe in Erfurt, Thuringia, Germany, on January 26. The plant is expected to eventually produce 30 million cells a year, enough to assemble 185,000 to 350,000 electric vehicles.

Matthias Zentgraf, president of CATL Europe, said the project cost CNY 13.2 billion, which he called it ‘the first mass battery production project in Western Europe’.

It is worth mentioned that in December this year, CATL's first overseas factory in Thüringer, Germany, achieved mass production of lithium-ion battery cells as scheduled. The first batch of cells by the first cell production line of G2 plant smoothly warehousing. The installation and debugging of the other production lines are being carried out to achieve the climbing production. This batch of battery cells has passed all the tests of the global products of CATL, which means that CATL has the local production and supply capacity to European customers. The CATL German plant plans to invest a total of 1.8 billion euros and has a planned capacity of 14 GWh.