Battery Manufacturing in the United States (NAICS 33591)

An investor's rollup primer. NAICS 33591 is a North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) "industry" — the 5-digit level. Figures are for the U.S. industry defined by NAICS code 33591. This is a short synthesis page; for the full deep-dive see the child primer for NAICS 335910.

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1. Overview

Battery Manufacturing covers companies that make the actual battery — the cell, module, or finished pack — from a disposable AA in a remote, to the lead-acid unit that starts a car, to the lithium-ion cell inside an electric vehicle (EV), to the room-sized rack that stores power for the electric grid.

Why an investor should care: this is a mature, cash-generating manufacturing base (car starter batteries, forklift and telecom backup power) strapped to one of the fastest-moving industrial build-outs in modern U.S. history. Tens of billions of dollars of "gigafactory" investment landed after 2022, chasing EV and grid-storage demand plus the federal subsidies attached to it. As of 2025-2026 the industry is living through a whipsaw: grid-storage demand is at record highs while EV demand just lost its federal consumer subsidy, leaving some brand-new plants idling and others being repurposed [1][2].

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2. What's inside — and why this level equals its one child

At the 5-digit level, NAICS 33591 contains exactly one 6-digit child industry: 335910, Battery Manufacturing. There are no sibling industries to aggregate, so this rollup level is effectively identical to that child — same scope, same firms, same federal statistics. The 5-digit and 6-digit codes are, in practice, two labels for one industry.

Scope of the single child (335910). Establishments "primarily engaged in manufacturing primary and storage batteries," spanning two families [3]:

• Primary (single-use): alkaline AAA/AA/C/D/9V dry cells, lithium coin/button cells, watch and hearing-aid batteries.
• Storage / secondary (rechargeable): lead-acid car and industrial batteries, nickel-cadmium, and — the growth story — lithium-ion cells, modules, and packs for EVs, consumer electronics, and grid storage.

The code captures the battery itself, not the surrounding supply chain: cathode/anode "active materials" and electrolytes sit in chemical manufacturing (NAICS 325 series), the mining of lithium/cobalt/nickel/graphite sits in mining (NAICS 212 series), EV assembly sits in Automobile/Light-truck Manufacturing (NAICS 336110/336111), and the nearest electrical cousins — capacitors and supercapacitors (334416) and fuel cells, which generate rather than store power (335999) — are excluded too. See the 335910 primer for the full scope-and-exclusions detail.

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3. How big it is (this level's rollup figures)

Because there is one child, this level's ground-truth totals are the child's totals:

Two things stand out. First, this is a highly concentrated industry — the four largest firms take roughly 70% of revenue and the top 50 take nearly 97% [4]. (The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, the standard concentration statistic, is suppressed in the federal data, so we do not state a value.) Second, it is small on paper relative to the noise it makes — about $28 billion of receipts and 40,000 workers is a fraction of the auto industry it feeds.

This 5-digit code is where the Fed measures output. The Federal Reserve publishes its real-output index at exactly this level (series IPG33591S), and it reached 243.3 in June 2026 against a 2017 base of 100 — physical production roughly 2.4 times the 2017 benchmark. That is an index of volume, not revenue or capacity. Note also that the 6-digit child was itself created in the 2022 NAICS revision by merging the former 335911 (storage) and 335912 (primary) codes, which complicates historical comparisons [7].

Undercount / timing caveat (important here). The $28.2 billion receipts figure is from the 2022 Economic Census — the year most gigafactory construction was still just an announcement. Since then U.S. EV-battery cell capacity alone was on track to roughly double, reaching about 421 gigawatt-hours (GWh) per year in 2025, with more than 1,000 GWh announced for 2028 [8]. Employment inside this code has been rising with each plant opening (and falling with each idling), so the federal figures understate the industry's current scale; third-party trackers that count the newer cell plants put U.S. battery-maker sales materially higher (industry-tracker estimates in the ~$50 billion range). A great deal of battery value is also booked in the adjacent codes noted above (materials chemistry, EV assembly, mining), so 33591 measures the cell/pack step, not the whole battery economy.

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4. Investable universe (where value concentrates)

With a single child, the investable universe is the same as 335910's — see that primer for the full company tables. In brief: batteries are an unusually indirect public market. The biggest U.S. producers are private (Clarios, the world's #1 car-battery maker at roughly 30% global share, owned by Brookfield/CDPQ; family-owned East Penn; Exide/Stryten), and most U.S. lithium gigafactories are foreign-owned or automaker joint ventures (JVs) that trade abroad or not at all (LG Energy Solution, SK, Samsung SDI, Panasonic; Ultium Cells, BlueOval SK, StarPlus Energy, Toyota's North Carolina plant) [11].

On U.S. public markets the value is thin and lopsided. EnerSys (NYSE: ENS) is the closest thing to a profitable, established pure-play, at $3.75 billion of fiscal-2026 net sales [9][10]. Around it sit a cluster of small, mostly pre-profit next-generation names (QuantumScape/QS, Enovix/ENVX, Amprius/AMPX, Solid Power/SLDP, Microvast/MVST, T1 Energy/TE, American Battery Technology/ABAT) that are technology-and-ramp bets; mature niche exposure through Energizer Holdings (ENR, household primary batteries mixed with non-battery consumer businesses) and Ultralife (ULBI, specialty/defense); and Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), which captures in-house "4680" cells plus Megapack grid storage as one slice of a much larger company.

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5. How the money works

Two business models sit under this code:

• Model A — established replacement batteries (lead-acid, industrial, specialty). Classic industrial manufacturing: a car's starter battery (SLI = starting, lighting, ignition) dies every ~3-5 years regardless of the economy, so aftermarket volumes are steady and recession-resistant. Lead is both the main input and the main recovered output — U.S. lead-acid batteries are recycled at a ~99% rate and a typical new battery is 80% recycled material, and the trade association put U.S. lead-battery capacity above 163 GWh a year as of August 2025 [12]. That loop does not remove commodity risk: EnerSys estimates a 10% rise in lead cost would have added roughly $65 million to cost of goods sold [9]. Gross margins in the ~25-30% range are achievable at scale — EnerSys reported 29.3% in fiscal 2026, but 25.1% excluding the Section 45X credit, so even the legacy incumbent carries a subsidy component in its margin [10].
• Model B — lithium-cell gigafactories (EV and grid storage). Capital-intensive scale-and-subsidy games where capacity utilization is everything — a half-idle plant bleeds cash, and the International Energy Agency estimates most facilities may take more than five years after opening to approach nominal output [15]. Cost per kilowatt-hour ($/kWh) is the scoreboard; global lithium-ion pack prices fell from ~$115/kWh in 2024 to a record ~$108/kWh in 2025, with stationary-storage packs cheapest at ~$70/kWh [13]. Crucially, the Section 45X production credit often IS the margin: $35 per kWh for a cell and $10 per kWh for a module (up to $45/kWh for a cell-less module), plus 10% of the cost of domestically produced electrode active materials — large enough to exceed several U.S. makers' pre-subsidy gross profit [14].

For the early developers there is no current profit model — they burn cash on research and pilot lines, and their value rests on a future licensing or manufacturing ramp. See the 335910 primer for the full unit economics.

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6. Demand drivers

• Grid / battery energy storage systems (BESS) — now the growth engine. The U.S. installed a record ~57.6 GWh (about 18.9 gigawatts) of new storage in 2025, up 52% over 2024, with Texas overtaking California; data-center and AI power demand plus solar pairing are pushing it hard, helped by the cheapest cell prices in the market [1][13].
• Electric vehicles — the biggest but now most policy-sensitive swing factor. EVs drove the gigafactory boom, and global EV battery deployment still reached 1.2 terawatt-hours in 2025, nearly 30% above 2024. The U.S. is the exception: deployment stagnated and the U.S. share fell to about 10%, a gap that widened when federal EV consumer credits ended (see Regulation) [15][19].
• Traditional automotive (SLI + start-stop), consumer electronics, and industrial/backup power (forklifts, telecom and data-center uninterruptible power supplies, defense) form the stable base under Model A.

Global battery demand exceeded 1.5 TWh in 2025, growing more than 35%, with stationary storage now a major incremental source alongside EVs [16].

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7. Regulation

Policy is unusually decisive here — it moves both the cost side and the demand side:

• 45X production credit (supply side) runs at full value through 2029 and phases down through 2032; the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) kept it but added Foreign-Entity-of-Concern (FEOC) restrictions that strip eligibility from components made with "material assistance" from prohibited (largely Chinese-linked) entities for tax years after July 4, 2025, with a cost-share test on prohibited-entity materials tightening from 2026 [14][17][18][20].
• EV consumer credits repealed (demand side): OBBBA terminated the $7,500 new-EV and $4,000 used-EV credits for vehicles acquired after September 30, 2025, with analysts expecting a 25-30% dip in EV sales that flows straight into battery-plant utilization [19][20].
• Trade tariffs: Section 301 raised the tariff on Chinese EV batteries and non-lithium battery parts to 25% in 2024, with non-EV lithium-ion batteries scheduled to reach 25% in 2026 — a central reason so little low-cost lithium iron phosphate (LFP) is made in the U.S. [21].
• Environmental and safety rules — Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lead-air standards and battery-manufacturing effluent guidelines, Occupational Safety and Health Administration lead-exposure rules, hazardous-materials transport rules for lithium cells, and the EPA's pending hazardous-waste treatment of discarded lithium batteries — round out the picture (detailed in the child primer).

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8. Consolidation

Because this level is one industry, its competitive dynamics are the child's: a shakeout is underway in lithium cells (a record ~$6 billion of announced projects were canceled in early 2025, including FREYR's $2.6 billion Georgia plant; GM's Ultium JV idled lines and cut over 1,300 jobs; Ford restructured BlueOval SK and idled its Kentucky plant; SK cut ~960 Georgia jobs) even as legacy lead-acid stays a stable oligopoly (Clarios, East Penn, EnerSys, Exide/Stryten), where cash goes to owners rather than capacity — Clarios raised debt to fund a ~$4.5 billion dividend to its private-equity owners in early 2025 [2][11][23].

Globally, the scale sits elsewhere. Chinese makers hold roughly 69-75% of the EV-battery market depending on the metric, CATL alone is about 39% and the only supplier above 30%, and LFP — about 81% of global installations in 2025 — is effectively a Chinese near-monopoly [22]. Global lithium-ion nameplate capacity passed 4 TWh at the end of 2025, with China above 80% and the U.S. and European Union at roughly 6-7% each [15]. The U.S. build-out is therefore best read as foreign technology on American soil: fast-growing, subsidy-dependent, and largely Korean-, Japanese- or automaker-owned.

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9. Risks

• Demand-policy whiplash — repeal of EV consumer credits is cutting EV demand and stranding capacity; battery demand is now unusually hostage to federal politics [19][2].
• Overcapacity and price deflation — U.S. cell capacity is on track to exceed domestic demand, pack prices keep falling, and even grid-storage cells flipped to oversupply in the U.S. market, which crushes high-cost or under-utilized producers [13][24].
• Chinese competition and the LFP gap, FEOC supply-chain squeeze, capital-intensity/execution risk on gigafactory ramps (five-plus years to nominal output), technology disruption (solid-state, sodium-ion), safety/liability from thermal-runaway fires, commodity volatility in lead/lithium/nickel/cobalt/graphite, and the post-2029 45X subsidy cliff — each covered in full in the 335910 primer [15][22].

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10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public-market routes. Profitable, defensive: EnerSys (ENS), anchored in industrial and replacement demand rather than the EV cycle [9][10]. Early-stage / speculative: silicon-anode and solid-state names (ENVX, AMPX, QS, SLDP, MVST, TE, ABAT) — high potential, mostly pre-profit, high dilution and failure risk. Primary / consumer: Energizer Holdings (ENR), diluted by non-battery businesses. Diversified proxy: Tesla (TSLA), plus foreign parents (Panasonic, LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, SK, CATL) that trade abroad. Battery/clean-energy exchange-traded funds spread single-name risk at the cost of diluting exposure with miners and materials firms.

Private-market routes. The scaled U.S. producers are private — Clarios (watch for a possible initial public offering), East Penn, Exide/Stryten — reachable mainly through private equity; growth/venture capital funds the cell and recycling startups (e.g., Redwood Materials); JV and project-level equity backs the automaker gigafactories. The child primer argues the better private opportunities may be the unglamorous bottlenecks — formation equipment, dry rooms, separators, quality-control tools, recycled feedstock, contracted specialty cells — where returns do not depend on winning a commodity cell price war.

Near-term outlook (judgment, not fact). The single most useful thing to carry away from this level is that "U.S. battery manufacturing" is one statistical category holding at least three different businesses, and they are diverging. Grid storage is the clear near-term winner (record installations, cheapest cell prices, AI/data-center power hunger, idled EV lines repurposed toward it), though cell supply has already run ahead of it. EV-battery capacity faces a painful digestion period after the credit repeal (under-utilization, further consolidation, a startup shakeout into 2026-2027). The legacy lead-acid base should keep quietly compounding on replacement demand. Two cautions apply throughout: announced gigawatt-hours are not output, and a domestic factory is not domestic technology. The key swing variables are whether 45X and tariffs hold, whether U.S. makers can close the LFP cost gap, and whether solid-state/sodium-ion chemistries arrive on schedule. For the full analysis, read the 335910 primer.

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Sources

Drawn from the child primer (NAICS 335910); numbering is local to this page.

1. American Clean Power Association / Wood Mackenzie, 2025 U.S. Energy Storage Installations Set New Record, Surpass 2024 by 52% (2026). https://cleanpower.org/news/report-2025-u-s-energy-storage-installations-set-new-record-surpass-2024-by-52/
2. EVXL, GM Lays Off 3,300 EV Workers As Battery Plants Idle (2025); Tech Times, EV Battery Plant Layoffs: 850 Ohio Workers (Ultium) (2026); FOX 5 Atlanta, SK Battery America Lays Off ~1,000 Workers (2025); KRON4, Automakers Lay Off Thousands as EV Incentives Die (Ford/BlueOval SK) (2025). https://evxl.co/2025/10/29/gm-lays-off-3300-ev-workers/
3. U.S. Census Bureau / NAICS Association, NAICS 335910 Battery Manufacturing — 2022 definition (2022). https://www.naics.com/naics-code-description/?code=335910&v=2022
4. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration Ratios (NAICS 335910) (2022). Receipts, firm count, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
5. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023 (NAICS 335910) (2023). Employment, establishments, annual payroll. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
6. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (NAICS 335910) (2023). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
7. Federal Reserve, Industrial Production Index: Battery Manufacturing (IPG33591S) (2026); NAICS revision notice. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPG33591S; https://www.federalreserve.gov/Releases/G17/Revisions/20251124/DefaultRev.htm
8. Environmental Defense Fund, Analysis Finds U.S. Electric Vehicle Battery Manufacturing on Track to Meet Demand (2025). https://www.edf.org/media/analysis-finds-us-electric-vehicle-battery-manufacturing-track-meet-demand
9. EnerSys, Form 10-K Fiscal Year 2026 (lead-cost sensitivity). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1289308/000162828026036900/ens-20260331.htm
10. EnerSys, Fiscal Q4 2026 Earnings Release ($3.75B net sales, 29.3% gross margin, 25.1% excluding 45X). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1289308/000162828026036903/ex991_earningsx4qfy26.htm
11. Blackridge Research, Top Lead-Acid Battery Manufacturers (Clarios ~30% share; East Penn largest single site); MarketScreener/loan reports, Clarios $4.5B dividend recapitalization (2025). https://www.blackridgeresearch.com/blog/do-you-know-the-top-lead-acid-battery-manufacturers
12. Battery Council International, Battery Facts and Applications; Sources (99% recycling rate, 80% recycled content, 163 GWh U.S. lead-battery capacity). https://batterycouncil.org/battery-facts-and-applications/about-lead-batteries/; https://batterycouncil.org/sources/
13. BloombergNEF, Lithium-Ion Battery Pack Prices Fall to $108 Per Kilowatt-Hour (2025; $115/kWh in 2024; stationary storage $70/kWh). https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-fall-to-108-per-kilowatt-hour-despite-rising-metal-prices-bloombergnef/
14. IRS, Final Regulations on Section 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit ($35/kWh cell, $10/kWh module, $45/kWh module without cells, 10% of electrode active material cost). https://www.irs.gov/irb/2024-51_IRB
15. International Energy Agency, Global EV Outlook 2026 — Electric Vehicle Batteries (capacity ramp time, global capacity shares, U.S. EV deployment). https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2026/electric-vehicle-batteries
16. International Energy Agency, Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 (global battery demand >1.5 TWh, >35% growth). https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook-2026/market-overview
17. Energy-Storage.news, US Finalises 45X Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit for Batteries, Solar; Congressional Research Service, The Section 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit, IF12809. https://www.energy-storage.news/us-finalises-45x-advanced-manufacturing-tax-credit-for-batteries-solar/; https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12809
18. Miller & Chevalier, OBBBA Brings 45X Changes, Though Not Wholesale Repeal (FEOC/PFE restrictions) (2025). https://www.millerchevalier.com/publication/obbba-brings-45x-changes-though-not-wholesale-repeal
19. Plante Moran, The OBBB and the End of EV Tax Credits (Section 30D repeal, Sept 30 2025); Thomson Reuters, EV Sales Expected to 'Dip' After Credits Expire Sept 30 (2025). https://www.plantemoran.com/explore-our-thinking/insight/2025/09/the-obbb-and-the-end-of-ev-tax-credits
20. Congressional Research Service, R48538 (EV credit termination, prohibited-foreign-entity provisions). https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48538
21. U.S. Trade Representative, Section 301 Tariff Actions on China (25% on EV batteries 2024, non-EV lithium-ion to 25% in 2026). https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2024/may/us-trade-representative-katherine-tai-take-further-action-china-tariffs-after-releasing-statutory
22. Carbon Credits, China Now Controls 69% of the Global EV Battery Market as CATL and BYD Surge in 2025 (2025); International Energy Agency, Global EV Outlook 2025 — Electric Vehicle Batteries (LFP 81% share) (2025). https://carboncredits.com/china-now-controls-69-of-the-global-ev-battery-market-as-catl-and-byd-surge-in-2025/; https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-vehicle-batteries
23. Inside Climate News, EV Battery Manufacturing Capacity Will Rise When 10 New Plants Come Online (record ~$6B of cancellations; FREYR Georgia) (2025). https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20022025/inside-clean-energy-ev-battery-manufacturing-capacity/
24. Solar Power World / Energy-Storage.news, U.S. Became an Oversupply Market for ESS Battery Cells (2026). https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2026/01/almost-overnight-the-us-became-an-oversupply-market-for-ess-battery-cells/