Cutthroat homogeneous competition in China's domestic new energy industry has become unsustainable, pushing local enterprises to expand overseas. On the eve of the All Energy Australia event, Chinese enterprises have brought the latest industry dynamics to Australia.

The domestic energy storage market is contracting, while Australia sees strong demand for energy storage, shifting the core competition focus of Chinese enterprises going global to channels and local services.

On October 28, All-Energy Australia kicked off at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Among more than 490 exhibitors, the Chinese exhibition group is the largest overseas cluster, with over 150 Chinese enterprises already present at the previous edition.

The day before the exhibition opened, Sungrow held a channel event with more than 600 attendees in Melbourne, rolling out new product launches and customer banquets simultaneously. Behind the event pace is a set of figures: In the first half of 2026, the newly installed capacity of new-type energy storage in China reached 17GW/45GWh, with a year-on-year power decline of 19.6%, marking the first semi-annual negative growth in three years of explosive growth; in the same period, Chinese enterprises signed 298GWh of overseas energy storage orders, up 83% year on year, with Australia ranking first among all single markets at 32.91GWh.

With one market contracting and the other expanding, enterprises naturally shift their pace to the latter.

0.4999 yuan is not a price, but a threshold

To understand why Chinese enterprises book larger exhibition booths year by year, we need to first go back to the domestic bidding records.

Huadian's 12GWh energy storage system framework procurement attracted bids from 59 enterprises, with the overall quotation range from 0.4923 to 0.6207 yuan/Wh, and the lowest winning bid price was 0.4999 yuan/Wh.

While the market pie is shrinking, the number of bidding enterprises has not decreased, making the expression of the supply-demand relationship on the quotation form extremely straightforward.

Further pressure comes from revenue.

The actual implementation rate of a large number of filed independent energy storage projects is only 30% to 40%, the actual rate of return of most power stations falls in the range of 3% to 4%, and more than half of the projects are in a loss-making state.

Investors cannot make the accounts add up, so the construction pace naturally slows down, and orders at the equipment end change from "increment allocation" to "stock competition".

Sungrow Power's overseas gross profit margin of energy storage systems in 2025 was 40.36%, compared with 18.49% in the domestic market, a gap of more than 20 percentage points that needs no rhetorical embellishment.

Sunwoda New Energy wrote "deep cultivation of overseas markets to hedge against internal competition" into its business statement during investor communications, which is not the preference of a single enterprise, but a unified action taken by a group of enterprises facing the same profit statement.

As a result, going global has changed from an "option" to an "outlet". But the problems faced after going global are far more complex than just "where to go".

Australia's door is wide open, and what you compete on after entering is not product brochures

Australia is indeed the most attractive single market for residential energy storage across the globe at the moment.

The penetration rate of rooftop photovoltaics is close to 40%, with a stock of over 4.3 million sets, while the energy storage matching rate has long stayed at around 10%. The federal government's "Cheaper Home Battery Program" has shortened the payback period of residential energy storage from 7-8 years to 4-5 years, driving a surge in corresponding demand.

Chinese brands occupy more than 70% of the market share in the residential energy storage battery and inverter market. The high density of supply side determines that competition will not stay at the level of "whether there are goods available".

The sales chain of residential energy storage in Australia runs from brands to distributors, from distributors to installers, and from installers to end households.

OSW has been the platform with the largest market share in Australia's residential solar and energy storage distribution market for seven consecutive years, and its distribution network covers more than 80% of installers. This means that even if a Chinese enterprise adds 500 extra cycles to the cycle life description and extends the warranty period by one more year on its Melbourne exhibition booth, such advantages weigh far less in the installer's procurement decision than another question: Can the goods arrive at the warehouse within two weeks, can a technical support call be answered within ten minutes, and can spare parts be delivered together with the installer's truck?

Maitian Energy's success in Australia in the first half of 2026 did not come from translating its domestic price list into Australian dollars, but from first signing distribution agreements with OSW and Solar Juice.

Sungrow took another path, building awareness among installers and end users with the brand logic of consumer electronics, making installers pay more attention to its products on the shelf and save more time during installation.

The two paths point to the same conclusion: The competitive medium in Australia is no longer product parameters, but the depth of channel embedding and the certainty of local service response.

While domestic competition focuses on the decimal points on the quotation form, in the southern hemisphere, the competition targets the warehouse turnover rate of distributors, the operation efficiency of installers and the coverage radius of the spare parts network. The same kind of "involution" has a higher threshold after changing the competitive medium.

The landscape of large-scale energy storage is quieter and more realistic. CATL's layout in Australia is not on rooftops, but on the grid side. The first and second phases of the Supernode project, with a capacity of 520MW/1858MWh, have been fully put into commercial operation. After the third phase is completed, the total scale will exceed 3GWh, making it the largest operating battery energy storage project in Australia's National Electricity Market.

This is not a channel business, but a business that tests the closing of project financing, the pace of large-scale delivery and the availability rate throughout the full life cycle. Competition in large-scale energy storage does not take place in the aisles of exhibition halls, but at the windows of financing delivery documents and grid connection approval. The people who can sit at that negotiation table and those who can only distribute brochures on the exhibition booth breathe the same air in the same exhibition hall, but are not at the same competition table.

Exhibition booths will be dismantled, but channels will not

More than 150 Chinese enterprises flew to Melbourne, competing on energy density, cycle times and the industrial design of all-in-one machines on their booths. These parameters have already been competed over in a full round in the domestic market, and doing the same in Australia is essentially not breaking out of the old script.

The real variables are outside the exhibition hall: whose distribution agreement covers more active installers, whose spare parts warehouse is closer to the installers' operation radius, and whose local technical team can give a transfer-free answer when the installer makes a call.

The penetration rate of residential photovoltaics in Australia is already close to 40%, and the stock of rooftops available for residential energy storage is real. But the path to turn the stock into orders is not under the spotlights of exhibition booths, but on the roads that installers drive every day.

The domestic market shrinkage forces enterprises to go global, but after going global, they find that competition has not become lighter, but deeper. In China, the depth of competition is measured in "minutes"; in Australia, the depth of competition is measured by the payment collection cycle counted in "weeks", the response speed counted in "hours" and the service radius counted in "kilometers".

The scoreboard for the next round of competition is not on the exhibition booths, but in those places outside the booths.