China now supplies almost two-thirds of lithium-ion battery imports

Claim types Fact

UN Statistics Division, UN Comtrade (HS, annual), commodity 850760 (lithium-ion accumulators; the same six-digit code in HS 2017 and HS 2022), imports by partner in current US$ as reported by each importing country, read from the UN Comtrade API via the progrss vault (source un-comtrade; datasets retrieved 10 Nov 2026; GUIDELINES §4.11). Set: the 66 countries that reported at least US$1 million of these imports in both 2017 and 2025, excluding China (it cannot import from itself) and the re-export hubs Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Arab Emirates and Panama. Their imports: US$11.5 bn in 2017, US$109.2 bn in 2025. Shares are progrss calculations: the sum of each origin over the sum of the 66 importers' world totals. The vault holds each importer's world total and its ten largest suppliers; China is among the ten for every importer except Kazakhstan in 2021 (US$1.8 million), so its share is complete; other origins are floors where they fall outside an importer's ten largest. Origin as recorded by the importer: EU members may record batteries arriving from another EU state by the state of consignment, so some Chinese-made batteries can appear as German or Polish. Taiwan appears in Comtrade as 'Other Asia, nes' (0.5% in 2025). Values are current dollars and battery prices fell over the period, so these are shares of value, not of capacity. Shares by year (China / Korea / Japan / Hungary / Poland): 2017 39.4 / 18.7 / 12.4 / 1.2 / 2.2; 2019 45.0 / 14.8 / 5.9 / 2.1 / 7.6; 2021 44.5 / 9.4 / 4.3 / 5.7 / 14.5; 2023 60.8 / 4.4 / 2.4 / 8.0 / 10.0; 2025 64.7 / 3.3 / 4.0 / 5.9 / 5.1. United States as origin, 2025: 4.1%. 'All others' is the remainder, so it is a ceiling. Comtrade images may be used with credit.