A RM20 million bet in Sepang could crack China’s battery stranglehold

A RM20 million bet in Sepang could crack China’s battery stranglehold


2 hours ago
K. Kathirgugan


This month, a small factory in Sepang begins producing what its maker says is Asean’s first homegrown electric vehicle battery. Its output is tiny. Its significance is anything but

The most important part of an electric vehicle (EV) is not the motor, the software or the badge. It is the battery, typically the single costliest component in the car. And until now, every EV sold in Malaysia has had a battery born somewhere else, mostly in China.

This month, that changes.


In a modest 15,000 square foot facility in Suria Industrial Park, Sepang, a company called Gigafactory Malaysia will begin small-scale production of a graphene-enhanced lithium-ion battery, according to a report by Nikkei Asia. The technology was developed right here at home, at a cost of around RM20 million.

Gigafactory Malaysia is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NanoMalaysia Berhad, an agency under the science, technology and innovation ministry (MOSTI). Incorporated in 2011 to commercialise nanotechnology, it has spent years quietly plugging away at energy storage, including a battery-supercapacitor hybrid EV project with Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, built on a converted Perodua Myvi.


“We are on the verge of operationalising Malaysia’s first local battery technology production factory,” NanoMalaysia chief executive Rezal Khairi Ahmad told Nikkei Asia. The project, he said, was “likely the first of its kind in Asean. No other country in the region is producing homegrown battery tech”.

The clever bit is in the chemistry. The battery uses a conventional nickel manganese cobalt formulation, but swaps the graphite normally used in the negative electrode for graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick.

Rezal says this increases energy storage capacity by up to three times, with a projected driving range of up to 640km per charge, and support for fast charging.

The factory will start small, then scale to megawatt hour (MWh) output as early as September. A first order for a 25-kilowatt hour (kWh) pack, roughly the size of a small EV’s battery, has already come in from a local organisation that NanoMalaysia has not named, with more deals being finalised and export markets like Indonesia, South Korea, India and Pakistan in its sights.


Why does this matter? Three reasons.

First, the global battery market is a Chinese monopoly in all but name. According to South Korean research firm SNE Research, China’s CATL alone supplied 40.2% of the world’s EV batteries in the first five months of 2026, with compatriot BYD taking another 14.4%. In the first four months of the year, seven Chinese companies together controlled 72.2% of the market.

Carmakers everywhere are desperate to diversify away from this chokepoint, especially after Beijing showed its willingness to restrict exports of graphite, the very material NanoMalaysia’s battery replaces.

Even at home, Perodua has publicly lamented that Chinese vendors for its QV-E electric car were not meeting its quality standards, delaying production. A credible local supplier would be an answer to a question the entire industry is asking.


Second, batteries are the future, full stop. We are electrifying everything, and every electron needs somewhere to sleep. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that battery storage is the fastest growing power technology in the world, with 108 gigawatts added globally in 2025 alone, 40% more than the year before, as costs have fallen more than 90% since 2010.

“Batteries are changing the game before our eyes,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol has said.

He is right, and the game is being played in Malaysia too. Malaysians registered 44,813 EVs in 2025, more than double the year before, and our newest solar tenders now require grid-scale battery storage built in. Every one of those batteries, in every car and on every grid, is currently imported.

Third, batteries are exactly the kind of industry Malaysia says it wants. We have spent four decades assembling other people’s technology, capturing slivers of value while the intellectual property, and the fattest margins, sit elsewhere. A homegrown battery industry flips that script, creating high-skill jobs for local electrochemists, materials scientists and process engineers rather than shipping our brightest abroad.

The ecosystem logic is sound too. NanoMalaysia is eyeing a nickel supply partnership with neighbouring Indonesia, which holds the world’s largest reserves, and is working on recycling end-of-life batteries to secure raw materials. That is a value chain, not just a factory.

Now, some honesty about scale. At full tilt, the Sepang plant will produce about one MWh of batteries a year, roughly 92,000 cells. CATL ships that much capacity every few minutes.

Nobody should pretend Malaysia has birthed a battery giant.

But every giant starts as a seed. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, was a government-backed long shot in 1987 that few took seriously. It now produces over 90% of the world’s most advanced chips.

The lesson is not that success is guaranteed. It is that no country ever built a strategic industry without planting something small and unglamorous first.

For once, Malaysia is not waiting to buy the future second-hand. This month, a battery will roll off a Malaysian line carrying Malaysian intellectual property.

Small cell. Big spark. Let’s keep it charged.