From shipping boxes to building plants: China's storage supply chain puts down roots in the Gulf

The Gulf's storage build-out is entering a new phase in its relationship with Chinese suppliers — from importing equipment to importing factories. Three data points in 2026 sketch the trajectory.

In January, battery maker Hithium won a Saudi Electricity Company contract to supply 4 GWh of storage for projects in Tabuk and Hail provinces, working alongside Saudi contractor Alfanar Projects. The order is notable less for its size than for its specification: it deploys Hithium's 1,175 Ah LFP cells — billed as the first mass-produced kiloampere-class cell — inside a 6.25 MWh container engineered for desert heat and dust, and comes with reported plans for a Saudi joint-venture manufacturing footprint. The award was first reported in August 2025 and re-reported by Chinese trade press in January 2026. SEC's procurement record also includes a 2.5 GW/12.5 GWh battery order from BYD signed in February 2025 across five 500 MW sites — corroborated by an IEA publication and industry reporting.

CATL, the world's largest battery maker, has taken a different route into the kingdom: services before factories. In November 2025 it opened the Middle East's largest new energy aftermarket facility in Riyadh — a full-lifecycle service center for EV and storage products, staged in front of Saudi industry ministry officials — and in January 2026 announced what it calls Saudi Arabia's largest new energy facility in the capital. Service networks are the unglamorous prerequisite for bankable storage at scale: lenders want assurance that a 20-year asset has a 20-year maintenance chain.

And the manufacturing push extends beyond Saudi Arabia. Sungrow has agreed with the Egyptian government and Norway's Scatec to cooperate on clean energy projects worth over US$1.8 billion, including a Sungrow factory in the Suez Canal Economic Zone. Further afield in the same window, Hithium signed a letter of intent for a roughly €400 million battery and energy storage plant in Spain, CALB committed €2.07 billion to a Sines, Portugal lithium battery factory, and Sungrow announced a €230 million European inverter-and-storage plant. Industry tallies put Chinese storage orders across the Middle East and Africa above 40 GWh in the first half of 2026 alone — about a quarter of all new overseas orders booked by Chinese firms — though such aggregates are trade-press estimates, not audited figures.

The direction of travel is clear, and it rhymes with what happened to Chinese PV manufacturing a decade earlier: national-scale procurement in emerging markets first pulls in Chinese equipment, then Chinese EPC capital, and finally Chinese factories — each step deepening switching costs. For buyers in the Gulf, the question is no longer whether Chinese technology will dominate their storage fleets, but who owns the factories, employs the technicians, and carries the 20-year performance risk.