This Thomas Index Report is sponsored by ProTechnologies, a leading custom battery pack manufacturer, and provider of engineering capabilities from concept through production.
Hello. In this week’s Thomas Index Report, we’re going to take a look at sourcing activity for Lithium Ion Batteries by users of the Thomasnet.com platform. Our data shows that sourcing activity in this category us up 32% year over year. Our data also shows that sourcing activity is up 34% in the related category of Lithium Batteries.
Our firmographic buyer data shows that the top two industries driving this trend are software and technology, and healthcare and medical.
Rechargeable lithium ion technology dates back to the 1970s, when a researcher at ExxonMobil figured out a way to make highly-reactive lithium store energy without the risk of explosion.
Since that breakthrough, and after decades of performance-enhancing improvements, Lithium Ion has become the world’s dominant rechargeable battery technology. It powers billions of smartphones, laptops, and tablets. It stores energy captured by solar panels. It provides the horsepower in Tesla cars and other electric vehicles, and much more.
While competing technologies such as solid state and flow batteries look to grab a larger share of the energy storage market, they face long odds when it comes to knocking Lithium Ion out of the top spot. Prices for Lithium Ion Battery Packs have decreased 85% since 2010, and as the technology gets cheaper, it’s creating even greater demand in new market segments.
Huge investments have been made in manufacturing facilities for Lithium Ion production; in fact, according to data from Bloomberg NEF, global manufacturing capacity for the technology nearly tripled in the last five years, and a wave of new factories for Lithium Ion battery production are being built in the U.S. and abroad.
With these sunk costs and new investments in the technology, Lithium Ion promises to remain the topmost rechargeable energy storage solution for the foreseeable future.
Moving on from Batteries, here’s a look at the top ten industrial product and service categories being sourced on the Thomasnet.com platform over the past four weeks.
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Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next week.