CATL invests in DeepSeek, Liang Wenfeng helps Zeng Yuqun stabilize the capital market narrative

Liang Wenfeng makes a move, handing the capital market a reassurance pill on behalf of CATL.

On October 22, according to foreign media reports, DeepSeek's new round of financing was about 100 billion yuan, and CATL was one of the main investors. Previously, according to media reports, the CATL system had already invested about 5 billion yuan in DeepSeek's first round of financing, becoming the main external investor second only to Tencent.

On the surface, CATL invested money in DeepSeek, which benefits DeepSeek, but this news is actually DeepSeek offering timely help to CATL, because CATL is now the party that needs help. Right now is the most tense moment between CATL and the capital market, and it urgently needs a reason to reassure investors.

A few days ago, it had just delivered a third-quarter report that worried the market: although revenue of 165.2 billion yuan hit a record high, net profit attributable to shareholders rose only 14.5% year on year. By comparison, it was 48.5% in the first quarter and 36.5% in the second quarter.

On the first trading day after the third-quarter report was released, its A-shares fell 12.03%, and the stock price retreated about half from the intraday high on May 7. What investors care about is what else CATL can rely on to continue growing.

AI is the story favored by the capital market, and DeepSeek is the hottest focus. DeepSeek's shareholder list is currently the hardest list to squeeze into in China's primary market.

So being able to invest in DeepSeek is not only CATL acting generously, but also DeepSeek being generous to CATL. Liang Wenfeng is helping Zeng Yuqun stabilize investors.

1

In fact, the capital market's attitude toward CATL has always been complicated.

It was once a genuine "King Ning," becoming the first company on the ChiNext board to exceed a market value of one trillion yuan in 2021; in May last year, it completed a secondary listing in Hong Kong, raising HK$41 billion (including the over-allotment option), the largest IPO of the year at that time.

But its strong bargaining power has also made it bear customers' dissatisfaction, and discussion of "de-CATLization" has never stopped.

In this earnings report, CATL was labeled as "revenue growth without profit growth," and the market began to re-examine this ability to make money. Even though this was its best quarter by revenue, and even though it earned an average net profit of 230 million yuan per day in the third quarter.

There seems to be only one step between "King Ning" and an "old-timer stock."

At the earnings call, investors' first question pressed on why unit profitability had changed.

Management gave three explanations: changes in product mix, and adjustments to consumption tax and export tax rebates. In the third quarter, energy storage batteries accounted for about one quarter of total sales; in addition, a batch of energy storage long-term agreements with low prices locked in in earlier years was concentrated for delivery in the third quarter, diluting profits.

Looking at it on another scale is more intuitive. Roughly calculating by dividing the group's net profit attributable to shareholders by battery sales, net profit per kilowatt-hour of battery in the third quarter was about 82 yuan, compared with more than 100 yuan in the same period last year, a decrease of about 20%.

When JPMorgan downgraded the H-shares, it expressed concern about the deterioration of industry profitability and the redistribution of profits across the industrial chain.

CATL now needs to stabilize market confidence, and it is precisely at this point that the value of investing in DeepSeek becomes apparent.

After becoming wildly popular in 2025, DeepSeek became an object that investment institutions competed to contact, and only this year did it raise external financing for the first time. Those who wanted to invest included both industrial capital and state-owned institutions. For a share that could not be obtained even with money, CATL nevertheless appeared successively on the investor lists of two financing rounds.

According to reports, during DeepSeek's first round of financing, an investor with an investment intention of 3 billion yuan contacted a senior executive of High-Flyer through personal connections, but ultimately received only an email address for submitting materials and failed to enter that financing round. Several investors who contacted the deal said that the first-round investors were mainly chosen by Liang Wenfeng, and it was difficult for those not invited to establish effective contact.

It wore the label of an "assembly plant" for many years, and its market value remained sluggish for a long time, with a price-to-earnings ratio of only about 10 times. But it insisted on presenting the posture of telling an AI story. In the end, it used AI demand to bring in new orders, making the market re-evaluate their growth space. In the first quarter of fiscal year 2026/27, Lenovo's AI-related revenue grew 60% year on year, accounting for 35% of total revenue.

At the beginning of the year, its market value was still hovering around HK$110 billion. By September 18, its market value had reached a peak of HK$460 billion, about four times higher, and at one point surpassed Meituan. A PC company was transformed and repriced as an "AI infrastructure leader."

What CATL needs is exactly such a narrative fulcrum.

2

According to reports, the CATL system invested about 5 billion yuan in DeepSeek in the first round; an affiliated capital party acquired about 38.1% of Vianet's shares for about 6.4 billion yuan; CATL also planned to acquire 49% of the controlling shareholder of Zhongheng Electric for about 4.1 billion yuan (including cash and equity consideration). The three transactions of the listed company and related entities totaled more than 15 billion yuan in disclosed or reported scale. In addition, CATL also led the investment in embodied intelligence company Galaxy General and nuclear fusion company Beta Fusion.

Zhongheng Electric is in the business of power supply for computer rooms, with customers including Alibaba, Tencent and telecom operators. In 2025, its share of China's high-voltage direct current power supply market for intelligent computing centers was about 31%, ranking first.

The intention of this investment is not hard to understand: to have CATL's energy storage and Zhongheng's power supply equipment enter computer rooms together. But whether Zhongheng's existing customers will therefore become CATL's buyers remains to be seen.

There is also an opportunity for a generation of equipment replacement hidden here. Nvidia, together with Google, Microsoft and others, released the 800V direct current power supply specification through OCP, supporting higher power supply demand by raising voltage and reducing conversion links. Although Zhongheng has already laid out 800V, it still said at its August earnings call that related products were in the stage of industrialization advancement. Keeping up with the technology route is only the starting point for participating in competition.

The significance of investing in Vianet should be viewed from the perspective of a computer room builder. As of the end of June, its wholesale IDC capacity in operation was 1007MW. The two sides proposed to cooperate in building "gigawatt-level computing-power plants." The attraction for CATL lies in the opportunity to participate in discussion and verification at the computer room planning stage, such as how much energy storage to allocate, how to coordinate with power supply equipment, and how to reduce operating costs.

On the other hand, the computer room business itself also has to absorb expansion costs. Vianet's second-quarter revenue grew 14.2% year on year, but gross profit fell 7.8%. The company explained that this was mainly due to increased depreciation from rapid expansion.

3

Electricity and computer rooms that can be connected to power are becoming key bottlenecks for the expansion of some AI projects. Microsoft CEO Nadella once said that the company had GPUs not yet installed, and what was lacking was electricity and computer rooms that could be put into use in time. In the PJM grid, where U.S. data centers are concentrated, the capacity clearing price in major areas rose to more than 11 times the original from the 2024/25 to the 2026/27 delivery years; Vertiv, which provides power supply and cooling equipment for computer rooms, saw its market value rise about 12 times in three years.

The domestic situation is slightly different. Four departments previously proposed that by the end of 2025, the share of green electricity in newly built data centers at national hub nodes should exceed 80%; green electricity direct connection requires coordinated construction plans for power sources, loads, and lines. Wind and solar power generation depends on the weather, and computer rooms cannot start and stop with the weather, so energy storage thus has a role to play.

Musk had actually already set an example on this path.

In 2024, Musk publicly predicted that after the chip shortage, the next shortage would be transformers, and after that, electricity. Tesla prefabricates energy storage equipment in factories with Megapack, and Megablock packages medium-voltage distribution into it, paired with software and long-term service, reducing on-site engineering.

In 2025, Tesla's automotive revenue declined for the second consecutive year, by 10%, while the energy business (power generation and energy storage) grew 27%, with a gross margin of nearly 30%; some media counted based on satellite images that about 720 Megapacks were already visible at the site of xAI's supercomputing center. Unable to wait for the grid, xAI simply acquired mobile power generation service provider APR Energy and generated power itself. According to media reports, the deal was about 1 billion US dollars.

CATL likewise has large-scale manufacturing and energy product delivery capabilities. At the Summer Davos in June this year, Zeng Yuqun proposed a sodium battery capacity target of more than 100GWh in the next 3-5 years, and talked about its application prospects in AI data centers.

SenseTime's Lingang intelligent computing center is a ready example. CATL participated in building a 35.776MWh energy storage system, but the platform that integrates computing power scheduling, electricity price forecasting and energy storage optimization was developed in-house by SenseTime.

Whether considerable profits can grow out of AI remains to be verified. At least investing in DeepSeek gave CATL an opportunity to tell a new story.

For CATL today, sometimes creating a new narrative is far more effective at restoring confidence than buybacks.

This article comes from the WeChat public account "Letter List" (ID: wujicaijing), author: Sibo, published by 36Kr with authorization.