Toyota, LG Energy Solution sign $3 billion battery supply deal in U.S. EV push
South Korea’s LG Energy Solution signed an agreement to supply Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, with lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles that will be assembled in the U.S., the companies said on Wednesday.
The deal will support Toyota’s expanding battery EV line-up, which includes a new model that will be assembled at a manufacturing plant in Kentucky — its largest globally — starting in 2025.
“The one thing I wanted to change was the fact that we don’t have any business with the number one player Toyota,” LG Energy Solution CEO Youngsoo Kwon said in an exclusive interview with CNBC aired on Thursday.
“So now we have nine of the 10 top automakers as our clients,” said Kwon, adding that LG Energy Solution will supply Toyota with 20 gigawatts worth of batteries every year from 2025.
Toyota has been the world’s top-selling automaker for three consecutive years, having sold nearly 10.5 million vehicles in 2022.
Toyota’s Tokyo-listed shares rose 2.91% in morning trading Thursday.
LG Energy Solution also supplies other automotive giants such as America’s General Motors, South Korea’s Hyundai, and Japan’s Honda. Less than five months ago, LG Energy Solution said it will build a $4.3 billion EV battery plant in the U.S. with Hyundai, in a bid to leverage tax credits.
Buyers of U.S-made vehicles are eligible for up to $7,500 in tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act.
“Inflation drew up investment amounts and labor costs have gone up for various reasons. Things are tough. The IRA tax credit is big, and it gets offset in the U.S. market. That’s why we are investing, building factories and supplying in the U.S.,” said Kwon.
LG Energy Solution will invest about 4 trillion Korean won ($3 billion) “to establish new production lines for battery cells and modules exclusively for Toyota, with completion slated for 2025.”
The Japanese car maker aims to offer 30 battery-electric vehicle models across its Toyota and Lexus brands and produce up to 3.5 million BEVs annually by 2030.
Chinese competition
LG Energy Solution is currently the world’s third-largest EV battery producer after Chinese EV player BYD, according to data from South Korean energy market research firm SNE Research.
Chinese companies dominate the sector even as EV adoption increases globally. China’s CATL remains No. 1, capturing 36.6% of the global EV battery market from January to July this year, according to SNE Research.
“It’s essentially a competition between Chinese and Korean companies, though we have Japan’s Panasonic too. I think it’s too early to fully assess the capabilities of the Chinese battery makers,” said Kwon.
“CATL is manufacturing mostly out of China. Keeping the production within China is very easy. This is a global business, so it needs to involve global operations.”
“It was easy for us to stay within South Korea. But we faced tremendous challenges in Poland as well as the U.S. I think whether Chinese players can do well with their global operations will be the factor who decides who wins between Chinese and Korean companies,” said Kwon.
Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.
Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.
“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.
The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.
“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.
AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.
Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.
Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.
Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.
However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.
The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.
In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.
Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”
“If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.
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