(Yicai Global) March 17 -- Contemporary Amperex Technology, the world's biggest electric vehicle battery manufacturer, has teamed up with a highway operator in southeastern China's Fujian province to construct battery swap stations for heavy-duty trucks.

CATL and Fujian Provincial Expressway will first build four stations between Ningde, the hometown of the battery firm, and the port city of Xiamen, the former said in a statement on its WeChat account yesterday, without disclosing any financial details about the project. The distance between the two cities is almost 350 kilometers.

This is not the first project of heavy-duty truck battery swaps in Fujian for CATL. Evidently, the firm and Chinese heavy machinery giant Sany Heavy Industry opened a pioneering battery exchange service for electric dump trucks in February 2022. The service is active between Ningde and Fuzhou, the provincial capital, and the distance between the two cities is about 175 kilometers.

CATL chose heavy-duty trucks as a target for battery replacement because it is highly feasible, an industry insider told Yicai Global when the Ningde-Fuzhou project was launched. Commercial truck routes are usually fixed, making the cost of building stations along the routes relatively low with less complicated technological requirements, especially for short distances, the person added.

Editor: Emmi Laine, Xiao Yi