The NAATBatt Onshoring Battery Technology Committee recently sponsored a delegation of NAATBatt members at InterBattery 2025. The delegation included representatives of 39 NAATBatt member firms, which either attended the conference in person or virtually.
Participating members had the opportunity to attend InterBattery 2025, the second largest battery conference in Asia (after CIBF in Shenzhen, China) and meet a wide with a range of Asian battery and battery component manufacturers. The NAATBatt InterBattery program allowed members to interact directly with decision-makers at the large Korean battery companies. Those decision-makers tend to be located in Korea, not in North America. The Onshoring Battery Technology Committee’s InterBattery program gave NAATBatt members an opportunity to interact with those decision-makers in a way that North American battery trade shows do not.
InterBattery 2025 was also an opportunity for the NAATBatt Offshoring Battery Technology Committee to speak with Asian companies that might be considering opening or expanding operations in North America. The Onshoring Battery Technology Committee’s mission is to help companies from outside of North America more easily move operations to North America and connect with potential partners, suppliers and service providers within the NAATBatt membership.
NAATBatt also participated in the U.S. EV Forum organized by the U.S. Embassy in Seoul in connection with the InterBattery 2025 conference. A large number of Korean battery companies attended the forum, including representatives of the three major Korean battery manufacturers.
I was asked to make remarks at the Forum on behalf of NAATBatt. I sensed that the Korean battery companies were interested in what I had to say, particularly to the extent my remarks related to the battery policy of the new Trump Administration. As expected, the Korean battery industry does not know what to make of the major policy announcements related to trade and manufacturing, which seem to change rapidly and appear impossible to predict.
In my remarks I told the Korean audience that I could offer no clarity with respect to U.S. policies affecting battery production, including tariffs, the future of the Inflation Reduction Act or the survival chances of various battery manufacturing tax incentives. I offered the prediction, however, that the frenetic pace of announcements was likely to slow (if out of exhaustion, if nothing else) and a consistent policy toward manufacturing should soon emerge. That said, I told the Koreans that I cannot predict what that consistent, less frenetic policy is going to be.
I pointed out, however, that whatever the details of the ultimate government policy will be, the basic strategy that the United States, and its interest in attracting Korean manufacturers to the United States, is clear and unlikely to change. That strategy has three elements.
First, the United States needs to acquire know-how in advanced battery manufacturing, which it by and large does not have today. That know-how resides in Asia, much of it in Korea. The United States will continue to reach out to companies in Korea in order to incent them to share that knowledge with U.S. engineers and technicians. The transfer of know-how, however, will not be a one-way street. Korean companies should reasonable expect to share in the markets, culture of innovation and world-class research capabilities that U.S. companies and research institutions can provide to them. The transfer of know-how that the U.S. desires will require a partnership.
The second element of the U.S. strategy is the need to build North American battery manufacturing to scale. It is abundantly clear that the winners in the world-wide competition for dominance of the lithium battery and automotive markets will be those companies, and those countries, that can produce high-quality products at the lowest cost. The primacy of low cost in this competition is at this point beyond question.
Manufacturing batteries at the lowest possible cost involves many factors. But the one indispensable factor is that manufacturing must take place at scale. Without the ability to amortize the huge capital costs of manufacturing lithium batteries over very large-scale production, making the lowest cost lithium battery will be near to impossible.
China is a case in point. The Chinese lead the world today in battery manufacturing principally because they have leveraged the scale of the largest EV market in the world in order to reduce the cost of the lithium batteries their companies produce. This strategy has worked well for the Chinese. But here is a secret: As large as the Chinese auto market is, the combined potential EV markets in the United States, Europe, Japan and Korea are even larger. If those markets can somehow be consolidated, the United States, Europe, Japan and Korea can recapture the advantage of scale from the Chinese. But this too will require a partnership.
The third element is securing the supply chain for lithium battery materials and components. Back in the 1970’s, the United States became highly dependent upon a commodity (petroleum), which was largely controlled by a small number of foreign producers. The United States paid a heavy price for that dependence. Over following decades that dependence forced the U.S. to spend trillions of dollars to manage affairs in a part of the world might otherwise have had little interest to American policymakers. The United States will never let this happen again. But preventing its re-occurrence in the area of energy materials sector will require cooperation with nations in Asia that have, make or process the battery materials and components that the United States will need in the 21st Century. This too will require a partnership between U.S. and Asian firms.
Lithium battery technology is one of the most critical technologies of the 21st Century. It is becoming more critical by the day. Securing the U.S. economy’s ability to manufacture that technology profitably and securely is not something that the United States can do alone. It will require partnerships with allied nations in Asia. No government policies, however frenetic, will change this fundamental fact.