Seres and CATL Sign Long-Term Strategic Cooperation Agreement in Chongqing

The deepening of this partnership matters less for the signature itself than for what it signals about vertical integration in China's EV supply chain: battery makers and automakers are moving from transactional supply deals toward embedded, regionally anchored collaboration. Chongqing's ambition to build a trillion-yuan NEV cluster gives the arrangement a policy dimension beyond the two companies. The open question is whether this model of co-located investment and industrial coordination becomes the template for other Chinese EV hubs, and how much it concentrates battery supply influence in CATL's hands.