[If the mountain is high, it’s high] [If it’s high, it’s high]

[If the mountain is high, it’s high] [If it’s high, it’s high]

Stocks of secondary battery and battery materials began to soar last spring and peaked in July. At that time, news of orders worth tens of trillion won continued, and earnings improvement was active, and Ecopro’s prediction that its stock price would exceed 2 million won in the future was also talked about. Electric vehicles and electricity were the most important themes, and the secondary battery industry was praised as Korea’s future food.

The Chinese battery factory facilities and design companies that I met at the large-scale secondary battery exhibition in China in May last year were talking about something different. They said that the number of orders they place has decreased sharply recently, and that they are concerned about excessive competition in the future because so many factory facilities are already being completed. They won so many orders in the first half of 23, that they don’t expect much for the second half of the year and are worried about 24 years. Last year, I thought, “No way?” But after a year, it was a very valid analysis.

This year, the atmosphere is completely the opposite. In a year, lithium-ion batteries have almost halved in China, and prices have fallen by 40% in overseas markets. When the price of electric vehicles goes up, cars that used to sell well fall in price, so things are happening that they don’t sell well (though overall sales are increasing). With subsidies cut and electric vehicle sales not growing as fast as expected, the story of the catharsis and the stock prices of related companies are one-third higher than last year’s peak. The future of the electric vehicle industry, the battery industry, and the material industry is dark, and now we hear voices called AI.

What do you think about the Chinese battery and material companies that we met at the China exhibition in June this year? Everyone thought that this kind of competition would be completed within six months. This is due to the fact that the amount of goods that are pushed out to the market below cost is a lot of inventory exhaustion, excessive inventory has been lost, the completion of new production facilities has decreased noticeably, and sales are increasing slowly. ESS is said to be exploding in sales, driving up insufficient demand in electric vehicles.

My friends told me that if I were to order ESS or buy an electric car, I should order it before fall comes. They have already started to reflect this situation in their estimates. In other words, battery prices are likely to rebound next year, which doesn’t make sense to me at first glance. I have a lot of expectations that battery prices will fall further as they are, but we’ll see in a year, right?