China's battery plan pays equipment makers first, cell makers later
The plan the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other departments issued Monday sets a 2030 target for "initial large-scale application" of all-solid-state batteries, a bar lower than most coverage implies. Warm isostatic pressing equipment makers such as Lyric and Lead Intelligent already have pilot-line orders booked and get paid at that stage regardless of outcome, while SMM puts full mass production two to three years further out.
China issued its first dedicated national plan for the new-type battery industry on Monday, covering the 15th Five-Year Plan period that runs from 2026 to 2030. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued it with other departments. Nan Cewen, a Tsinghua University professor and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, called it the first plan of its kind for the sector, and the target list explains why cell makers and equipment suppliers have both been waiting for it.
The headline goal is "initial large-scale application" of all-solid-state batteries by 2030. The target can be met through early deployments at meaningful volume, such as demonstration fleets, before the technology reaches ordinary car buyers. Alongside it sit two other 2030 markers: a 15,000-cycle life for long-life lithium batteries, and defect rates at parts-per-billion levels among leading producers. The plan sets 19 priority tasks across five areas, keeps the supply chain centered on lithium, and treats sodium-ion and flow batteries as complements. For scale, the battery industry's output value already topped 1 trillion yuan, about $149 billion, during the outgoing 14th Five-Year Plan; the new document is written to keep that line climbing through 2030.
Two other targets also shape the plan's implications. A 15,000-cycle life is a stationary-storage number: a passenger car rarely sees more than a few thousand full cycles over its life, so a battery built to run 15,000 times is aimed as much at grid storage as at cars. Parts-per-billion defect rates are a safety target as much as a quality one. Cell defects are what start battery fires, and a country that wants to ship storage systems by the gigawatt-hour into markets where towns are already banning them needs a manufacturing record it can point to. Together, these targets point to batteries designed to sit on the grid for decades, with solid-state as the premium tier.
A lower bar is still a real one for planners inside state-linked automakers and battery groups, who now have a national target to show progress against years before 2030 arrives. Warm isostatic pressing fits this stage of development. The process applies heat and pressure evenly from every direction to close the microscopic voids that form where a solid electrolyte meets a solid electrode, the exact point where today's all-solid-state prototypes tend to fail through poor ion transport or mechanical breakdown. Every serious pilot line needs a press like this. Equipment sales therefore arrive at the pilot-line stage, years before anyone knows whether a given cell chemistry will ever reach a factory floor.
Mid-September disclosures, reported by SMM on September 16, show that happening already. Lyric, listed in Shanghai as 688499, said its warm isostatic pressing equipment has reached mass-production delivery standards, that a full-line all-solid-state project it built for a leading automaker has passed phased acceptance, and that it holds orders from two further customers for pilot lines. Lead Intelligent, listed in Shenzhen as 300450, has been winning full-line all-solid-state orders since the third quarter, running parallel lines that cover dry-electrode processing, electrolyte coating, stacking and isostatic pressing; it held about 30% of the stacking-equipment market in 2025. A subsidiary of ST Funeng, Chaoye Precision, is shipping in small batches. Overseas, the established names in warm isostatic pressing are Sweden's Quintus and Korea's Hana; the domestic field also includes AVIC Airborne's Chuanxi Machinery, along with Naknor, Kexin, Huazi and Rongqi. The plan may also accelerate domestic equipment suppliers. A national target written in Beijing tends to be met with domestic equipment, so the foreign incumbents in warm isostatic pressing are likely to find the fastest-growing market for their machines filling up with local rivals before its first gigawatt-hour line is built.
Investors responded quickly. In Tuesday morning's A-share session, a thin-volume bounce off Monday's one-year low, solid-state battery stocks led the gainers alongside real estate. That is a one-day reaction to a policy document. It says nothing yet about any single company's order book, but it shows where investor attention has already moved.
The evidence remains limited: two pilot-line orders here, a run of third-quarter wins there, a small-batch shipment from a subsidiary most investors have never priced separately. SMM itself flags three real bottlenecks that no equipment purchase resolves on its own: interfacial mechanical stability, interfacial electrochemical stability, and dendrite formation. Monday's plan changes what counts as progress: a pilot line that a battery maker could previously postpone now counts toward a national target officials will be asked to report on. State-linked manufacturers will keep placing these orders to be seen complying, on a timeline policy sets, and that is exactly why the equipment makers carry less risk than the cell makers whose reputations depend on the technology working at all.
SMM's timeline is the next measure to watch: 2026 and 2027 as the window in which delivery validation either turns into repeat orders or stalls out. The desk expects the first GWh-level all-solid-state demonstration lines to be announced by the end of 2027, with repeat orders from an existing customer as the signal. A reorder would be stronger evidence of demand than a series of first-time orders. Automotive qualification, meaning a carmaker actually putting cells from these lines into a production vehicle sold to the public, is a 2027-28 story, later than the current equipment order book would suggest on its own.