The "small business" that recorded a loss of 3.1 billion yuan: the boss from Maoming made NIO, Li Auto and Xpeng line up to pour money into it.

Why a loss-making second-tier battery manufacturer is favored by well-known automakers at the same time.

On September 4, Sunwoda took two major moves in one go.

Xiaomi Auto held the "Dragon Armor" battery strategic cooperation conference, and Sunwoda Power, a subsidiary of Sunwoda (hereinafter referred to as "Sunwoda Power"), was confirmed as one of the cell suppliers; in the evening, it announced that Li Auto had invested 2.65 billion yuan to increase its capital in Sunwoda Power, subscribing for 8.79% of the shares. After the transaction is completed, the Li Auto-related parties will hold a total of 11.17% of the shares, jumping to become the second largest shareholder.

It is rare for a battery company to be named by two automakers in one day. For this company, this is even somewhat contradictory. A week ago, it just released a semi-annual report showing increased revenue but no increased profit: revenue reached 38.179 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 41.48%; net profit attributable to shareholders was 603 million yuan, a year-on-year drop of nearly 30%; non-net profit after deduction even plummeted 80% year-on-year.

In the global installed power battery volume ranking for the first half of the year, its market share was only 2.4%, ranking 10th.

Looking at a longer time horizon, the situation is even more complicated. More than 8 months ago, Sunwoda Power was sued by Vertiv Electric, a Geely-affiliated company, over cell quality issues, with a claim of about 2.3 billion yuan, which is close to the sum of Sunwoda's two-year profits. Although the two parties reached a settlement in February this year, it needs to pay 608 million yuan in 5 installments, and the incident is expected to drag down the net profit attributable to shareholders in 2025 by 500 million to 800 million yuan.

Things are not going smoothly in the capital market either. Sunwoda Power, which planned to list independently, had its Hong Kong stock prospectus expire twice, its market value shrank by 10 billion yuan within 3 years, and was once considered by investors to be in an "anxiety period".

But interestingly, its shareholder camp is still expanding, and more and more giants are standing behind it.

Parties related to Li Auto, NIO, Xpeng, SAIC Motor, GAC Group, and Dongfeng Motor have long appeared in the shareholder camp; more than a month ago, the newly entered Sungrow Power not only invested 650 million yuan to take a stake in Sunwoda Power, but also became its largest energy storage cell customer with a procurement volume of 25 GWh.

"China Entrepreneur" learned from Sunwoda that this cooperation with Li Auto has evolved from business cooperation to strategic investment, and the transaction is also conducive to optimizing the balance sheet structure, further meeting the strategic development of the battery business and subsequent capital needs.

In other words, it not only gets funds, but also locks in future orders. "The relationship between automakers and battery companies is continuously deepening from the traditional procurement and supply relationship to joint development, production capacity coordination, even capital cooperation and ecological cooperation," an industry insider said, which means that automakers are further binding core supply chain partners through strategic investment.

It seems that Sunwoda is building a special business model for its subsidiary — not only related to customer orders, but also an ecological niche design that embeds customers into the shareholder system. But this raises a core contradiction: why a loss-making company that has been involved in litigation and suffered valuation shrinkage has become the "own people" that automakers are competing for?

In the automotive industry, power battery has always been one of the unignorable core products. Batteries account for 30% to 40% of the total vehicle cost, which means that whoever controls the batteries controls the profit statement of automakers. The strong position of CATL in the industrial chain has made "de-CATL-ization" a tacit collective action of automakers for a period of time in the past.

This "pain point" is exactly the playing field that the Wang brothers of Sunwoda — founder Wang Mingwang and chairman Wang Wei — are best at in the consumer battery track in the past: exchanging concessions for "presence".

Different from Zeng Yuqun, the founder of CATL, and Wang Chuanfu, the founder of BYD, Wang Mingwang, who has a grassroots background, has always adopted a "low-profile" offensive strategy of "one millimeter in width, one kilometer in depth" in his bones.

This model allows Sunwoda, which is often in a late-mover position, to cut into the power battery track all the way, and its scale is getting larger and larger. But under the current competitive landscape, the model of giving up pricing power corresponds to huge risks at least from the perspective of financial data.

At the very beginning of his business, he could spare no effort to win customers, but facing the growing business, Wang Mingwang really needs to think about how to make profits.

The "Little Guy"

In the power battery industry, Wang Mingwang can be regarded as a "little guy" with an ordinary starting point.

With no professional background or relevant work experience, he was just a high school student who came out of a rural area in Maoming, Guangdong at the age of 17. From working in a lithium battery factory to the first 5 years of starting his own business, Wang Mingwang's life was far from decent — when he was an employee, he worked from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m.; his first two ventures both ended in failure: the mold workshop was dissolved, and the nickel-metal hydride battery factory split up.

Before founding Sunwoda, he only had the previous plant and equipment in his hand. "I worked for others for a year and a half at that time, and later I felt that this industry had good prospects, so I came out to start a business. In the early days of Sunwoda, the company didn't even have money to pay salaries."

But he has a very prominent label, which may be his confidence: he is good at getting orders, "low-profile" and dares to bet everything. The industry generally believes that several key nodes for Sunwoda to gain a foothold in the industry rely on this "persistence to the end".

In 1999, by chance, he learned that Konka Group was preparing to produce its own brand of mobile phones, so he took the initiative to visit and proposed to produce batteries for it.

"At that time, Konka was already a listed company, but we were just a small, little-known enterprise. However, I had full confidence in our product and technical capabilities, so I assured Konka that 'our products are better and the cost is lower', and suggested them 'just give it a try, you have nothing to lose'," Wang Mingwang recalled. After leaving Konka's gate, he went straight back to the company and led the entire R&D team to work around the clock.

In the following 21 days, the whole team worked overtime to complete the customized battery samples for Konka's mobile phones. It is reported that the quality was 40% higher than the standard sample, while the cost was reduced by 30%.

This deal was barely profitable according to the calculation at that time, but it got Sunwoda a ticket to enter the supply system of big customers. Wang Mingwang later concluded that entering Konka's supply chain made him realize that only by benchmarking against high-end customers can we make the best products.

An even more typical battle is the protracted war with Philips.

In 2001, Wang Mingwang tried to seek cooperation with Philips, taking the opportunity that a certain model of mobile phone was planned to be released. But the deal was firmly rejected by Philips, on the grounds that Sunwoda was not a "well-matched" partner after on-site inspection.

He did not continue to argue, but bought Philips' products to disassemble by himself, made samples with exceeding quality and 30% lower price and sent them to Philips, but was still rejected. He then pasted the "Sunwoda" label on the products and sold them in the secondary market.

Until two years later, the original battery supplier had serious quality problems, and Philips was in a hurry to deliver goods but could not find alternative sources. Within a week, Sunwoda urgently supplied 60,000 sets of batteries to Philips, thus entering its supply chain system.

This is not the first "curve to save the situation". Wang Mingwang was quite lucky, and several of his bets paid off. For example, his first bucket of gold also came from emergency support — in 1995, a fire broke out at Sony's Fukushima battery factory, making batteries extremely scarce on the market. Wang Mingwang used all his savings to stock up on battery materials, assembled them and sold them to Sony.

He never publicly reviewed the underlying decision-making logic of these incidents. Simply from the results, as long as the products are made good enough and cheap enough, the other party will one day "change their mind", which may be the criterion he firmly believes in.

In the power battery business, this criterion has even been amplified.

Sunwoda has always maintained a posture of "low-profile offensive, strong service", avoiding direct confrontation with leading companies such as CATL. 36Kr once reported a detail: it once specially set up a team of 30 to 50 people, stationed next to Xiaomi Auto's office in Jinqiao, Shanghai, waiting to respond to customer needs at any time.

The cooperation with Li Auto is even deeper. In 2025, Sunwoda Power and Li Auto each hold 50% of the shares to establish a joint venture battery company. The new generation of Li Auto L8, which was launched in June 2026, is fully equipped with Sunwoda cells. The battery packs are produced by the joint venture, and the shell is directly marked with the "Li Auto" logo.

Some media directly said that it is doing "OEM", and some even said that it "abandoned its soul". But the more consensus point is that in the "affordable alternative" list of automakers, Sunwoda can always become the most cost-effective fallback option.

Wang Mingwang never simply pursues orders, what he wants is "binding", even at the cost of becoming an OEM.

"Second Supplier"

For a long time, the battery industry has been occupied by the duopoly of CATL and BYD, which account for more than half of the market share. Sunwoda can only maintain a strong position in a segmented track — it has ranked first in China's HEV hybrid lithium battery sales for 5 consecutive years, and became the global No. 1 in the second quarter of 2026.

In fact, as early as 2014, Sunwoda established the power battery division. But when the weight of power battery was greatly increased in 2017, Wang Mingwang still placed his bet on a track that was extremely narrow, difficult to do, and not mainstream at that time.

Due to the high technical threshold of power-type cells, long verification cycle, and strict audit of Japanese customers as the main demand side, many battery companies dare not take such orders.

Wang Mingwang's logic is very simple: "Precisely because it is difficult to do, if you do it well, it will prove that we have the ability to make power batteries well." This market gap also gave him enough feedback in the future.

In recent years, the net profit of automakers has been under pressure. According to media statistics, in the first half of 2026, the total net profit attributable to shareholders of 15 mainstream automakers was only 21.048 billion yuan, while the net profit attributable to shareholders of CATL alone in the same period reached 43.284 billion yuan. Batteries account for 30% to 40% of the total vehicle cost, and the industry consensus is that whoever controls the batteries will hold the lifeline of the automakers' profits.

As a result, the automotive industry has set off a tacit "de-CATL-ization" movement. At present, GAC, Dongfeng, Geely and other automakers have invested in independent R&D of power batteries; NIO has terminated its cooperation with CATL in the field of solid-state batteries, and instead established a wholly-owned subsidiary to fully focus on the R&D of semi-solid and full-solid-state batteries; Xpeng has gradually introduced CALB, EVE Energy...

Some insiders believe that compared with the strong position of CATL, most automakers need "their own people" to have a certain say in the supply chain. "Second supplier" has therefore become a buzzword in the industry in the past two years, and Sunwoda has significantly expanded its automaker customer base in the same period, which seems to have seized the right ecological niche once again.

In the first half of 2026, Sunwoda's net profit was less than 1 billion yuan, and its market share was about 2.4%, belonging to the second tier of the market. This position is not enough to compete with the giants, but precisely because it is "small", it has become an ideal target in the eyes of automakers.

Wang Mingwang has laid low for several years, and the industry was not optimistic about this company. Wang Wei once recalled the scene when entering the power battery industry: "At that time, the stock directly hit the limit down. Everyone thought you were crazy, many people were about to close their business, but you just came in to do it."

Wang Mingwang is cautious enough. The first cell product took 3 to 4 years to be mass-produced in 2019.

In 2021, Sunwoda won the designated supply for more than ten models such as Geely PMA platform, Dongfeng, GAC, SAIC-GM-Wuling Hongguang MINIEV, Renault-Nissan, etc. The total annual shipment of power batteries was 3.52 GWh, with revenue exceeding 2.9 billion yuan. In the same year, CATL's revenue exceeded 130 billion yuan.

However, Wang Mingwang seems to have been deliberately weakening Sunwoda's dominant position — he started to "take sides" very early. When the whole track is competing for market resources, this strategy is completely contrary to that of many direct competitors.

In September 2021, Sunwoda established Shandong Geely Sunwoda with Geely's system, holding only 30% of the shares, and its production capacity mainly serves Geely's system.

Sunwoda Power also opened financing to customers. In February 2022, it introduced 19 investors at one time, including Li Auto-related parties, NIO-related parties and a number of automaker-related capital institutions; in July 2026, Sungrow Power invested about 650 million yuan, and Tianqi Lithium invested 150 million yuan to enter...

The shareholder list of Sunwoda Power covers the whole industrial chain from lithium resources, cells, complete vehicles to energy storage systems, and the industrial chain has long-term binding with it through real money. After the C+ round of financing in July, the total number of its shareholders has expanded to 87. Although the equity has been diluted round after round, and even some media said that the valuation of the latest rounds of financing has shrunk, Wang Mingwang's strategy has been fully implemented, and he has truly become the "own people" in the eyes of many giants.

"Narrow Gate"

Wang Mingwang has never been a creator of industry trends, but he has finally stood on the trend. However, from the perspective of financial data, it remains to be discussed whether his strategy has brought equivalent returns.

In the first half of 2026, Sunwoda's overall gross profit margin was 15.33%, and net profit margin was 1.23%, while the corresponding figures of CATL were 23.93% and 16.98%.

In the capital market, this path is even recognized as "arduous". In March 2023, Sunwoda planned a 4.8 billion yuan private placement, but announced its withdrawal 5 months later; in July, it spun off Sunwoda Power to the ChiNext board, and completed the counseling filing in October, but the plan was stranded due to the improvement of the ChiNext board's net profit threshold.

In July 2025, Sunwoda planned to go public in Hong Kong; on January 30, 2026, its Hong Kong stock prospectus expired for the first time. After resubmission, it expired again at the end of July. After all these twists and turns, Sunwoda's market value is only a "fraction" of CATL's.

There have long been doubts in the industry: Sunwoda, which has orders from Apple's supply chain and a large number of automakers, is clearly in a favorable position, but it is difficult to make profits.

This is not difficult to understand. Its growth is real: in the first half of 2026, the gross profit margin of Sunwoda's power battery business increased by 8.59% year-on-year to 18.36%, which is the only core business in the company with positive gross profit margin improvement. But from the detailed data of Sunwoda Power, the transfer of pricing power is also real, and even in the