On 8 May, at its 2025 annual results briefing, BTR New Material Group Co., Ltd. disclosed Q1 revenue of RMB 4.31 billion (~US$635 million) and net profit of RMB 225 million (~US$33 million), with anode material sales of over 140,000 tonnes and a record monthly sales high in March alone. The company also confirmed that its silicon-based anode business continues to grow at pace, and that it will keep increasing investment and driving product iteration. Beyond the headline financials, the more important signal from this briefing is BTR’s framing of an industry-wide shift: the global anode materials sector is entering a new round of technology transition, with the locus of competition moving away from large-scale manufacturing of conventional graphite anode toward silicon-based anode, high-end fast-charging systems, and global supply chain capability.
From Boom and Bust to a New Cycle
The anode materials industry has been through a textbook cycle over the past few years. From 2021 to 2022, on the back of rapid EV demand expansion, the segment ran red-hot — graphitisation services, needle coke, and finished anode were all in short supply, and capacity additions came thick and fast. From 2023, as new capacity hit the market in concentrated waves, the industry pivoted into price competition. Margins on low- and mid-end products collapsed, and many players found themselves in the awkward position of holding capacity but no profit. Second-tier anode companies — limited in customer mix, graphitisation integration, and overseas footprint — were progressively dragged into the price war.
But just as the industry consensus settled on the view that anode had become a “commodity material”, a new round of technology upgrade has started building inside the sector. The most important shift is that silicon-based anode is genuinely transitioning from the laboratory into industrial-scale production — and BTR is one of the most fully positioned players globally.
The Three-Way Moat: Graphite + Silicon + Global
The global anode materials industry remains dominated by Chinese companies. BTR, Putailai, Shanshan Inc., and Zhongke Electric form the domestic first tier, while overseas peers — mainly Showa Denko (Japan) and Mitsubishi Chemical Group Corporation — are concentrated in Japan and South Korea. The competitive logic has shifted materially. Early-cycle anode competition was about graphitisation cost and scale; today, downstream battery customers care most about high-end product capability, global delivery, and next-generation R&D.
BTR’s most significant edge isn’t scale per se but the fact that it holds all three legs at once: conventional graphite anode, silicon-based anode, and an overseas manufacturing system. According to publicly disclosed data, commissioned anode capacity reached 782,500 tpa by year-end 2025, with sales ranked among the global top players for several consecutive years. The genuine differentiator, however, is the customer mix. Many domestic competitors have large nameplate capacity, but their customer base is heavily concentrated in the domestic power battery market, leaving order books highly exposed to cycle conditions — profitability deteriorates sharply when prices turn down. BTR has maintained an unusually high share of overseas customers, with particularly deep relationships across Japanese and Korean cell makers.
Localisation Becomes the New Filter
This positioning matters more than ever in the current regionalisation of the new energy supply chain. Anode used to be considered the lithium battery material least in need of overseas production, given its longer shipping radius and mature technology. That has changed completely. US and European new energy policy is shifting from subsidising end consumption toward rebuilding local supply chains. Whether it is the US IRA or Europe’s domestic battery strategy, battery materials are being pulled local, and overseas manufacturing capability is becoming a key supplier screen for global cell makers.
BTR was one of the earliest Chinese anode players to push overseas. Phase 2 of its 80,000 tpa Indonesia anode project has now been commissioned, and its Morocco facility plans 60,000 tpa of anode capacity alongside 50,000 tpa of cathode capacity. Beyond “overseas factory building”, the more important point is that BTR is progressively forming a global manufacturing network spanning China, Southeast Asia, and North Africa — with China handling R&D and core process work, Southeast Asia providing scale-up manufacturing and resource integration, and Morocco positioned directly into the European supply chain. The structure now closely mirrors the global playbook used by tier-one solar manufacturers.
Silicon-Based Anode: The Real Game-Changer
Silicon-based anode is the variable that will ultimately decide the future industry structure. It has long been seen as the key route for next-generation high-energy-density cells, but commercialisation has consistently lagged market expectations because the technical difficulty is far greater than for graphite. While silicon’s theoretical capacity is much higher than graphite’s, severe volume expansion during cycling causes capacity fade, interface instability, and structural damage to the cell. The genuine challenge is therefore not making a laboratory sample — it is achieving stable mass production at scale.
Industry technology routes are now coming into focus, broadly grouped into silicon monoxide (SiO), silicon-oxygen, silicon-carbon composite, CVD silicon-carbon, and porous silicon. SiO is the most process-mature and likely to scale first; CVD silicon-carbon and porous silicon are higher-performance routes but carry higher cost and process complexity.
BTR’s differentiator is that it covers nearly all of these. Publicly available information indicates the company has positions across SiO, ground silicon-carbon, CVD silicon-carbon, and porous silicon, with several products already shipping in volume. This is platform-style positioning, not a single-route bet — a deliberate response to the fact that no one in the industry yet knows which route will become dominant. Whichever player gets to stable, large-scale production and into top-tier battery supply chains first will hold real pricing power in the next phase.
Other Chinese players moving quickly on silicon include Putailai, Xiangfenghua, and Silicon Source. But the number of companies with credible ten-thousand-tonne industrialisation capability remains small. Many can produce high specific capacity samples but still fall short on cycle life, consistency, and compaction density. BTR’s long-running deep integration with top power battery customers gives it tangible advantages on validation cycles, mass-production experience, and process stability.
Silicon Isn’t Just EVs
Silicon-based anode is no longer an EV-only story. New application categories are emerging quickly: humanoid robots, eVTOLs, AI hardware, and high-rate energy storage all demand higher energy density, faster charging, and better volumetric efficiency than conventional consumer electronics. In humanoid robotics in particular, the battery system determines not just runtime but also overall machine weight and dynamic performance. High-capacity silicon anode is moving rapidly up the priority list.
More broadly, the power battery industry is starting to re-value anode. Industry attention has historically gravitated toward cathode upgrades — high-nickel, LMFP, solid-state — but anode is increasingly seen as the next breakthrough vector, particularly with 6C and 8C ultra-fast charging moving into series production. That demands higher capacity, but also stronger lithium-ion diffusion, better interface stability, and improved thermal stability. The implication is that high-end anode will not commoditise the way conventional graphite did — it will evolve into a highly customised material system.
AI in the Mix
This is also why BTR specifically called out “AI + materials compute to power R&D and operations.” New energy materials development is entering a data-driven phase. Historically, taking a new material from lab to industrialisation required extensive trial-and-error and long validation. With AI-driven materials simulation, molecular structure calculation, and process optimisation maturing, leading players are using compute to compress R&D timelines. For a material system as complex as silicon-based anode, future competition will increasingly hinge on data and R&D throughput rather than experimental capability alone.
Bifurcation Ahead
The industry trend points to widening bifurcation. Low- and mid-end graphite anode will continue down the low-margin, large-scale manufacturing path, while companies that genuinely hold high-end products, silicon-based anode, and global delivery capability are well-placed to rebuild technical moats. Many companies are still in “expand capacity” mode, but BTR is already re-architecting its global production structure around the next generation of anode systems.
What makes BTR’s briefing worth watching is therefore not the sales recovery or profit print, but the explicit positioning of future competition around global supply chains, high-end silicon-based anode, and next-generation battery material systems. As global power batteries enter a new technology upgrade cycle, the anode industry looks set to swing back into a technology-driven phase, rather than the pure scale-and-price competition of recent years. For the broader lithium battery materials industry, the question going forward is not who makes graphite the cheapest — it is who masters the next generation of anode materials first.
Note: All CNY figures converted to USD at an approximate rate of 1 USD = 6.79 CNY as of 16 May 2026.
Source: Shimo Shixun (石墨时讯) via Carbontech, “贝特瑞，破记录”, republished via WeChat, 15 May 2026.
Original source: Carbontech
Disclosure: This article has been translated from a Chinese-language source published on WeChat. For clarity and formatting purposes, GraphiteHub has made some adjustments; however, all underlying facts, figures, and quotations are from the original source. GraphiteHub does not guarantee the accuracy of the translation and accepts no responsibility for any errors, omissions, or misinterpretations. Readers should refer to the original WeChat article for the authoritative source material. This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
