The global electric vehicle battery industry’s growing emphasis on securing raw materials rather than refining capacity is reinforcing Zimbabwe’s strategic position as a lithium producer, even as questions emerge over how its beneficiation drive will interact with shifting global supply dynamics, Mining Zimbabwe can report.
By Ryan Chigoche
Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL), which dominates roughly 39.2 per cent of the global EV battery market, says the biggest constraint facing battery manufacturing is no longer processing, but access to mined raw materials.
“Processing is not the bottleneck, but mining is,” CATL Vice President Jiang Li said in a recent interview. “We want to build our cost advantage with our upstream capabilities.”
The comments reflect a broader structural shift in the battery value chain. While China continues to dominate mineral refining, manufacturers are increasingly prioritising direct access to mining assets as price volatility and supply insecurity reshape investment decisions.
CATL has already moved in that direction, planning to establish a dedicated mining unit while bringing in senior advisory expertise from China’s largest metals mining group. Its existing portfolio includes lithium, cobalt and phosphate assets across China and overseas.
The company’s own lithium mine in Jiangxi has experienced disruptions since August 2025, contributing to recent price volatility—a development that appears to be accelerating its upstream push.
Supply Security Is Now Driving Investment
The strategic shift highlights a wider industry reality: supply security, rather than processing efficiency, is now the main driver of investment decisions in the battery sector.
For lithium-rich countries such as Zimbabwe, this trend is significant. It suggests that ownership and control of upstream resources are becoming as important as downstream processing capacity in determining long-term relevance in global battery supply chains.
Zimbabwe has Africa’s largest lithium reserves and has attracted more than US$3.4 billion in mining and processing investments since 2021, largely from Chinese-linked capital seeking long-term supply security.
However, CATL’s comments suggest that future investment decisions may increasingly prioritise stable, scalable mine output over downstream policy frameworks alone.
Beneficiation Strategy Is Validated – But With a Caveat
Zimbabwe’s policy shift toward mineral beneficiation, most notably its ban on the export of unprocessed lithium, aligns with global efforts to move up the value chain.
On paper, this strategy is supported by the global direction of the industry, which is seeking more resilient and geographically diversified supply chains.
However, CATL’s framing introduces an important caveat: while beneficiation is strategically sound, it does not replace the growing importance of mining output itself.
In other words, Zimbabwe’s strategy is validated in principle, but its success depends on whether domestic processing capacity expands fast enough to match rising investor expectations for supply security and volume consistency.
Failure to scale both mining and beneficiation in parallel could risk bottlenecks that undermine the country’s competitiveness in a market where suppliers are increasingly sensitive to supply disruption.
Sodium Batteries Are Not Replacing Lithium Yet
Alongside its upstream mining push, CATL is also advancing sodium-ion batteries as part of its long-term risk management strategy.
However, the company is not signalling a transition away from lithium. Instead, sodium is positioned as a hedge against periods of elevated lithium prices.
“If the price of lithium goes up, then we can make more sodium-ion batteries,” Jiang Li said.
This conditional approach is critical. It confirms that lithium remains the backbone of global battery supply chains, while sodium serves as a complementary technology for specific applications, particularly energy storage and cost-sensitive segments.
For Zimbabwe, this means lithium demand remains structurally intact in the medium term, even if diversification into alternative chemistries gradually increases over time.
Zimbabwe’s Balancing Act
CATL’s upstream strategy underscores a central tension for Zimbabwe: how to balance resource nationalism and beneficiation policies with the need to remain an attractive, reliable supplier of mined lithium.
The country’s policy direction has strengthened its positioning as a value-add hub, but the global shift highlighted by CATL suggests that mine output reliability may ultimately matter just as much as processing capacity.
CATL itself has previously said Zimbabwe’s export restrictions are unlikely to materially disrupt global lithium supply, noting that production is still dominated by Australia, South America and China, while local processing capacity in Zimbabwe continues to expand.
Bank of America Securities has also assessed the impact of Zimbabwe’s policy shift as limited, citing CATL’s ability to pass upstream cost pressures on to consumers.
The broader signal from CATL is clear: the next phase of competition in the battery industry will not only be about refining capacity or chemistry innovation, but about securing stable access to raw materials at scale.
For Zimbabwe, the opportunity is significant—but so is the pressure. The country is increasingly central to the global lithium narrative, yet its long-term position will depend on whether it can simultaneously expand mining output, accelerate beneficiation and maintain investor confidence in a rapidly tightening supply race.
