Why most battery-makers struggle to make money

The inevitability is comforting for bosses in industries from mining to chipmaking. Not, though, in battery manufacturing. Anticipating booming demand for electric vehicles (EVs), since 2018 companies around the world have ploughed more than $520bn into battery-making, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a research firm. Sure enough, the investments (plus improvements in technology) have pushed down the prices of batteries and, since these make up a third of the cost of an EV, of battery-powered cars. But not sufficiently to entice motorists to go electric. And so the industry is facing a bust without ever having had much of a boom.