I don't know what you are smoking but it's some good shit.

NCM, NCMA, LFP, sure chemistries are cool to talk about but all that actually matters is batteries that are actually shipping.

LG Chem is claiming they can catch up, claiming they can start building LFP by 2026... only over a decade too late. CATL didn't develop LFP but they developed all the mass production techniques which is what counts in the market. No one cares how good you can theoretically produce cells if you never do.

Right now all I see is the Koreans claiming they can make up lost ground, not today mind you, by 2026+ and somehow then they will then become the dominant producers.

They do this based on projections of CATL not growing at all which makes no fucking sense given they are entirely supply constrained right now. People end up buying EVE and other second tier cells because of how hard it is to buy from CATL right now.

Sorry but it's fantasy.

If Korea/Japan/US want to beat CATL it's going to take more than hopes and dreams. It's going to take factories, lots of them. Not just the ~1-3 plants a piece that are currently on the roadmap.

Protectionism doesn't and can't explain the sheer capacity of CATL/BYD. Protectionism 101 is that by adopting protectionism you increase the local cost of the goods as a result by disallowing other competitors. That clearly isn't the case as CATL is the best price/performance cell anyone can buy for LFP friendly workloads anywhere in the world. It's not subsidy either as they are wildly profitable at the same time, even having enough margin to eat increases in lithium costs (partially because they are big enough to own their own mines) keeping themselves competitive as others are priced out.

Korea/Japan/US dropped the ball, it's simple as that. They had the lead but choose not to pursue it. Same with EVs until Tesla came long. GM should have been dominant but again they didn't have the balls.

When push came to shove they didn't want to put the money down and that is what counts in the end. China said they were going to build EVs and that was going to need batteries. That created the appropriate conditions for battery companies to invest heavily in China. LG Chem was late to the party, their first plant in Nanjing was nearly 10 years too late, that isn't protectionism that is just missing the boat. That and they were building NCM at a time that CATL was already producing LFP at good enough energy densities to displace NCM for EVs and storage applications. NCM is a "better" chemistry sure, but it's too damn expensive for cheap ass EVs that dominate the Chinese market.

This entire debacle is entirely one of mismanaged leads and it repeats across most modern tech that China is now doing well in.

Solar? Should have been won by US/Germany/Australia. Wind? US/Germany. Batteries? Korea/Japan. Nuclear? US/France/Germany/Japan. EVs? US. Telecom? Canada/Sweden. The pattern here is China invests and doesn't let new technology get fucked over by entrenched special interest groups. It's a political advantage at it's core, something the West might find very hard to replicate.

Also your soccer comparison is beyond dumb so I'm not even going to bother addressing that.