- Overseas expansion and long-term supply deals fuel growth
- Battery materials now account for nearly half of revenue
Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, a world leader in metals mining and production, reported record earnings for 2025, underscoring how China’s battery-materials champions are benefiting from sustained global demand for electric vehicles and energy storage supply chains.
According to the annual earnings report released yesterday, the Jiaxing-based company posted revenue of 81.02 billion yuan ($11.85 billion), up 32.9% year on year, while net profit attributable to shareholders jumped 47% to 6.11 billion yuan.
This represents Huayou’s strongest performance on record and the first time annual profit surpassed 6 billion yuan.
Over the past few years, Huayou Cobalt has built a fully integrated “mine-to-market” business model spanning the entire EV battery lifecycle.
Battery materials and upstream resources remained the company’s core growth engine, generating 39.66 billion yuan in revenue and accounting for nearly half of total sales.
Huayou, a major supplier of lithium-ion battery materials and energy metals, has built an integrated global value chain spanning nickel, cobalt and lithium resource development, refining, precursor and cathode production, as well as recycling.
The company holds an estimated 18% global market share in ternary precursors, ranking second worldwide, while its share in high-end cylindrical ternary cathode materials reaches about 60%.
Huayou has also maintained the world’s top position in cobalt products for eight consecutive years, expanding global market share to roughly 30% in 2025, ahead of overseas rivals.
Long-term supply agreements signed during the year reinforced demand visibility. Huayou secured memorandums covering 79,600 tons of ternary precursors with international clients, a 127,800-ton high-nickel cathode materials contract with battery maker EVE Energy, and additional precursor and cathode orders totaling more than 160,000 tons with LG Energy Solution.
Its power battery materials have entered supply chains of major automakers including Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Renault, Nissan and Jaguar Land Rover, while consumer battery materials are shipped to global electronics brands such as Apple, Huawei, Samsung and HP, its exchange filings show.
International operations continued to expand, with overseas revenue reaching 50.56 billion yuan, accounting for 62.4% of total sales.
In Indonesia, Huayou has secured more than 1.4 billion wet metric tons of nickel resources through investments and offtake agreements, building multiple hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical projects with combined annual capacity of 245,000 tons of nickel intermediate products.
New projects are advancing with partners including Vale Indonesia and Ford Motor, while integrated copper-cobalt operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and lithium projects in Zimbabwe aim to lower raw-material costs. In Europe, the company’s first 25,000-ton cathode materials plant in Hungary has completed construction and entered commissioning.
As of press time, Huayou Cobalt’s shares traded at 60.2 yuan, up about 4% from the opening price, giving the company a market capitalization of about 114 billion yuan.
