CATL to Begin Sodium-Ion Battery Deliveries in September, Targets GWh-Scale Shipments by Year-End
CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker, is about to cross a critical threshold in the commercialization of sodium-ion battery technology. At a company event this week, Xu Jinmei — Chief Technology Officer of CATL’s Energy Storage Division and President of its European operations — announced that the company will begin delivering its first sodium-ion battery solutions to customers in China this September, with global market deliveries to follow in June 2027.
The timeline represents a significant acceleration for a technology that has long been touted as a promising complement to lithium-ion but has struggled to reach mass production. Xu confirmed that CATL’s dedicated sodium-ion production lines are now fully operational, providing a stable manufacturing base that the company believes can support large-scale commercial deployment before the end of this year. By December, CATL expects to hit gigawatt-hour-level shipment volumes — a milestone that would cement sodium-ion as a credible, industrial-scale energy storage chemistry.
Sodium-ion batteries offer several structural advantages over their lithium-ion counterparts. The raw materials — sodium compounds — are abundant and widely distributed, sidestepping the geographic concentration and supply-chain volatility that have periodically rattled lithium markets. The chemistry also delivers superior low-temperature performance, inherently higher safety margins, and a notably flat temperature curve during high-rate charging. These characteristics make sodium-ion particularly attractive for stationary energy storage and entry-level electric vehicles, even as lithium-ion remains the dominant technology for high-energy-density applications.
CATL has also made meaningful progress on the manufacturing front. Xu said that through improvements in material structural consistency and production process control, the company has significantly raised yield rates on its sodium-ion products, and that its costs now run 10 to 20 percent below the industry average. That cost edge matters enormously in the price-sensitive energy storage market, where a few percentage points can determine whether a project penciled out.
The confidence behind this rollout is backed by hard numbers. In April, CATL signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Beijing-based energy storage integrator Hyperstrong (Haibosichuang) for 60 GWh of sodium-ion battery orders over three years — the largest sodium-ion battery deal ever signed globally. CATL had already revealed at that time that its “NaXin” sodium-ion battery brand would enter volume production in the fourth quarter of 2026, with applications spanning battery swapping, passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles, and grid-scale energy storage.
Taken together, the September delivery target and the operational production lines suggest that CATL is executing on that roadmap ahead of schedule. If the GWh-scale target materializes by year-end, 2026 will mark the year sodium-ion batteries moved from laboratory promise to industrial reality — with CATL, once again, setting the pace.