BEIJING (Reuters) - Shares in CATL, the world's largest battery maker, dropped nearly 4% on Wednesday after the Chinese company warned that its annual revenue fell for the first time last year and that profit grew at its slowest pace since 2019.
CATL said in a securities filing late on Tuesday that its revenue fell between 8.7% and 11.2% last year after it adjusted product prices to reflect a decline in the price of raw materials such as lithium carbonate, leading to a decline in operating income although sales volumes grew.
The annual revenue fall would be the first since CATL started releasing its operating figures in 2015.
Net profit rose between 11.1% and 20.1% in 2024 from the previous year, marking its slowest profit growth since 2019.
CATL is due to report its full-year results on March 15 but Chinese companies sometimes voluntarily disclose earnings estimates especially when there are significant changes.
Shares in the company shed 3.8% in the morning session on Wednesday, its largest intraday decline since Oct. 11, while the ChiNext market in Shenzhen fell 0.6%.
CATL intervened in the lithium market in 2022 when prices for the battery material were soaring by opening a huge lithium hub in the southern Chinese province of Jiangxi.
Lithium prices have since tumbled by nearly 86% over the past two years from its peak in late 2022 and CATL's founder Robin Zeng told Reuters in November that they were stopping production at the mine as they had achieved their goal.
The company has been pushing beyond batteries, launching a new EV chassis in December and strategising a pivot to power grids.
It is also working on investments abroad, including a 100 GWh battery factory in Hungary to supply the likes of Mercedes-Benz and BMW, as well as a new jointly owned battery plant with Stellantis in Spain.
On Tuesday, CATL's co-chairman Pan Jian told the annual World Economic Forum in Davos that the company was hoping to announce other major joint venture efforts in Europe with other automakers.
Reuters reported earlier in January that CATL has hired banks to work on a Hong Kong float, in what could be one of the city's largest offerings in 2025.
The company had a 45.1% market share as measured by batteries in Chinese-made EVs last year, up 1.9 percentage points from the previous month. The combined market share of second-ranked BYD and third-placed CALB slid by 4.3 percentage points to 31.4%, according to data from the China Automotive Battery Innovation Alliance.
(Reporting by Qiaoyi Li, Ethan Wang and Brenda Goh; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
