China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and six other ministries
issued the New-type Battery Industry Development 15th Five-Year Plan. The plan
directs the creation of a graded cultivation system to build high-quality,
leading new-battery firms and explicitly supports corporate mergers and
reorganizations to foster full-industry-chain, world-class companies. It
prioritizes scaling a backbone of high-tech firms and specialized, refined,
differentiated and innovative (specialized “little giant”) SMEs alongside
manufacturing single-champion enterprises. The plan also calls for enhanced
monitoring and services for gazelle and unicorn companies, rollout of a
manufacturing excellence quality-improvement program with ongoing enterprise
quality-management evaluations, and the formation of SME-focused industry
clusters to underpin high-quality growth in China’s new battery sector.