Battery Cell & Gigafactory Manufacturing
The industry — Battery manufacturing
Base industry report for 33591 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 47
- Under 10 employeesA
- 40%
- Establishments · USA
- 297
- Employment · USA
- 31,445
- Payroll · USA
- $2.4B
Of 47 Canadian establishments with employees, 40% have fewer than ten — weighted toward mid-sized establishments.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Come with the asset, or buy the business that owns it. Plant, fleet, land or quota decide this market before any operating skill does. Operators here are bought, not started.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 10
The binding constraint — capital intensity
The gigafactory wave is real demand, not hype: CATL alone sold 661 GWh of lithium-ion batteries in 2025, up 39% [A], and North America is trying to localise that supply. But a cell plant is not a business an entrant with ordinary resources can go into. It is a few cell makers building plants that cost billions, sized for an anchor automaker, and underwritten by production subsidies about as large as the capex. PowerCo's St. Thomas plant is up to C$7B for up to 90 GWh [A] — about C$78M per GWh at the stated maximums — and the Parliamentary Budget Officer puts the federal and Ontario production subsidy for that one plant at C$13.2B [A]. The US 45X credit pays $35 per kWh of cells sold until 2030 and phases out by 2033 [A]. Everything is sunk years before the first sale, and the pipeline shows what happens when the demand forecast moves. Québec wrote off $270M when it ended Northvolt Six [A]; Honda indefinitely suspended its C$15B Ontario EV value chain [A]; Ford took a $2.9B charge leaving BlueOval SK, taking two Kentucky plants at a $0.9B fair value while assuming a $3.8B DOE note [A]; GM booked $7.9B of EV realignment charges in 2025, battery-cell JV settlements included [A]. Even the leader in Canada earns on the subsidy: LGES's Q3 2026 operating profit of KRW 756B falls to KRW 339.1B without North American credits [B]. Plants are surviving by pivoting to grid and data-centre storage — NextStar Windsor now sells ESS cells, and Tesla shipped its first Megapack with Nevada-made LFP cells [A]. The reachable business is around the plant, not in it: construction (EllisDon expects about 1,300 workers at peak in St. Thomas [A]) and the suppliers and services a town of 42,840 people [A] will be asked to provide.
Cells, modules and cathode material ship across borders. NextStar says it exports mainly to the US, and US subsidies and tariffs are what decide where a plant goes. The plants compete for automaker and storage contracts across North America and against Asian imports. Siting is local (a town, a substation, a workforce), but the market is not.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
The field
Every operator named on this record, and what each one discloses. A private single-site operator discloses nothing, which is the normal case — the listed consolidators are the only window in.
Competitor set · 10 named · 0 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology)SZSE: 300750A | not disclosed | — | 2025 revenue RMB 423.7B and net profit RMB 72.2B, stated in renminbi in its 10 March 2026 annual-report release; 661 GWh sold, 772 GWh capacity, 39.2% global power-battery share citing SNE Research. No North American cell plant. |
| LG Energy SolutionKRX: 373220B | not disclosed | — | Q3 2026 preliminary revenue KRW 9.6434T, operating profit KRW 756B, KRW 339.1B excluding North American subsidies (secondary report). Owns NextStar Energy outright and half of Ultium Cells with GM. |
| NextStar EnergyA | not disclosed | — | Windsor, Ontario; wholly owned by LGES since February 2026; more than C$5B invested, 1,300 direct jobs. No revenue published. |
| Ultium Cells (GM and LG Energy Solution)A | not disclosed | — | Equally owned JV; cell plants in Warren, Ohio and Spring Hill, Tennessee per GM's FY2025 10-K. GM's equity income from it fell from $465M (nine months 2025) to insignificant (nine months 2026). |
| Panasonic EnergyA | not disclosed | — | Gigafactory Nevada (over 11 billion cells since 2017) and De Soto, Kansas (planned about 32 GWh). Segment results were not opened. |
| SK OnA | not disclosed | — | Kept BlueOval SK's Tennessee plant after the May 2026 split with Ford. Its site blocks automated access; no figures read. |
| Samsung SDIC | not disclosed | — | StarPlus Energy JV with Stellantis in Kokomo, Indiana. Its current status (a reported Stellantis exit or energy-storage retooling) was not confirmed at source. |
| BYDC | not disclosed | — | Number two in global EV batteries by secondary SNE Research reporting that could not be opened; no North American cell plant found. |
| PowerCo (Volkswagen Group)A | not disclosed | — | St. Thomas, Ontario: up to C$7B, up to 90 GWh, up to 3,000 jobs (Volkswagen Group, December 2023); operations now expected in 2029 (PowerCo Canada, 24 September 2026). Not yet producing. |
| TeslaNASDAQ: TSLAA | not disclosed | — | Makes its own cells at Gigafactory Nevada, now including LFP cells for Megapack; a captive buyer, not a seller of cells. Total revenue (nine months 2026: $78.67B) is not battery revenue. |
Nobody here publishes revenue. The market is not sized for that reason — an estimate built on nothing would only look like knowledge.
Evidence
Evidence. Read at source [A]: Statistics Canada business counts for NAICS 335910 (July 2023, the cube on file) and US County Business Patterns 2022 for 33591, both from local copies. Volkswagen Group's 12 December 2023 release for PowerCo St. Thomas (C$7B, 90 GWh, up to 3,000 jobs). The St. Thomas Economic Development Corporation's post of PowerCo Canada's 24 September 2026 release (EllisDon, 60→1,300 workers, operations in 2029). That page does not restate the C$7B. The Parliamentary Budget Officer's releases of 12 September and 17 November 2023. Québec's 2 September 2025 release ending Northvolt Six: C$510M disbursed, C$270M lost, a guaranteed C$240M land loan, 352 MW to be reallocated, and nearly 3,000 people building plants at Bécancour. Honda Canada's 14 May 2026 statement: the project is suspended indefinitely, 1,000 incremental jobs, no government funds transferred. NextStar Energy's 5 March 2026 grand-opening release and LGES's 21 October 2026 release. GM's FY2025 10-K and Q3 2026 10-Q, Ford's Q3 2026 10-Q and Tesla's Q3 2026 10-Q, all on EDGAR. Toyota's newsroom (release of 12 November 2025 and facility page). Panasonic Energy North America's pages. CATL's 10 March 2026 annual-report release. 26 U.S.C. §45X via Cornell LII. St. Thomas's 2021 Census population (42,840, census subdivision 3534021) is taken from the Census Profile already held in ru/local/data/ca-st-thomas.json. Secondary [B]: LGES Q3 2026 preliminary results via Asia Economy (the LGES IR release was not opened). CATL's 39.2% share is SNE Research data as CATL reports it. E2's Clean Economy Works tallies are an advocacy group's count: 51 large US clean-energy projects cancelled, closed or scaled back in 2025 through October, about $28.8B. That covers EV, battery, solar and other projects, not batteries alone, so it is kept here rather than in figures. Not read or blocked: powerco.de and powerco.ca disallow all crawlers in robots.txt. cnevpost.com and batteryindustry.net block ClaudeBot, so the full SNE ranking (BYD, LGES and the rest) was not opened. sootoday.com and bnnbloomberg.ca block Anthropic agents. www12.statcan.gc.ca showed a security check. tesla.com, gm.com, ultiumcell.com and panasonic.com returned Akamai 403s. skon.com disallows all. energy.gov LPO project pages returned 404. The status of StarPlus Energy's second Kokomo plant and of Samsung SDI's and SK On's US plants beyond the Ford 10-Q was not confirmed. No cell price series, no plant-level margin and no Ontario or Québec production-subsidy contract text was read. The C$78M per GWh is derived from two stated maximums and is UNVERIFIED as a cost. Ford's $0.9B fair value against a $3.8B note is the only market-tested value of a North American cell plant found. The cut factor is analyst judgment.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.
No vertical software market has been recorded along this branch yet. The base industry report says what the subsector typically runs on.