BUY AN electric vehicle (EV) in the Philippines and the priciest part of it is the battery. The country ships out nickel as raw ore, while finished cells arrive from a supply chain someone else built and priced.
That gap was the question hanging over the opening panel of the 4th Asean Battery Technology Conference, which ran from Aug. 19 to 21 in Sepang, Malaysia. Host NanoMalaysia Berhad (NMB) set the theme as “Industrializing Battery Technologies: Strengthening Asean’s Battery Value Chain for Global Competitiveness,” a push to move the region from buying batteries to making them. The first panel asked how Asean should position itself for the global market. The Philippines was not among the panelists, although the Electric Vehicle Association of the Philippines (EVAP) was at the conference and will host the next edition in 2027. In the industry the panel described, the Philippines still enters the chain mainly as a supplier of raw material.
A battery value chain climbs from the ground up. Miners pull out nickel and other minerals. Refiners purify them, manufacturers turn them into battery materials and cells, factories assemble the packs, carmakers fit them into vehicles and recyclers recover what is left. Each step up adds value. The Philippines works near the bottom, digging ore and sending it away.
Prof. Jose Bienvenido Manuel Biona, EVAP’s executive director, explained why when I asked him what staying a raw supplier costs us. The problem starts in the ground. Philippine nickel reserves are large, but the ore is not battery grade. Getting it there takes heavy purification, and purification consumes energy. Philippine electricity and fuel prices are high. So turning nickel into battery-grade material and then into cells is difficult to do competitively at home.
Indonesia has nickel much like ours, he said, and the energy to process it. Indonesia can make something of its nickel at home. We cannot, not yet.
At the conference, Indonesia and Malaysia showed what that looks like. NMB and Indonesia’s National Battery Research Institute launched a jointly developed lithium-ion cell, drawing on Indonesia’s strength in nickel-based battery material and Malaysia’s in formulation and cell development. Two neighbors built a cell together, while the Philippines still ships out ore.
The Philippines exports nickel in two forms, raw ore and a partly purified product from two high-pressure acid leaching (HPAL) plants. Even that output is not battery grade, he said, and needs further refinement after export. The plants pre-process mainly to cut shipping costs, so exporters are not paying to move dirt and impurities. Biona tied those investments to a period of higher nickel prices. At current prices, he said, new HPAL investment is hard to attract.
So where can the country compete? “The more viable route is to pre-process, reduce impurities, and export most probably into China wherein they have the whole supply chain there and then bring back the cells. That is where we come in again. So our role is pre-processing and then battery pack assembly. And the electronics part of it, because we’re quite strong on the electronics part of it,” Biona said. The costliest component in a locally sold EV is built from cells the country does not make.
The chemistry is the other reason nickel looks shaky for the next decade. Nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) cells work well, Biona said, but they are expensive. That cost is why the market has shifted to lithium iron phosphate (LFP), which uses no nickel at all. LFP leads now, and he expects it to stay ahead through about 2035.
Biona does not write nickel off, though. Around 2035, as solid-state batteries reach wider commercial use, nickel-based chemistry is expected to come back, and the first solid-state cells are projected to carry a lot of nickel. He left open whether Philippine nickel will still be competitive against other suppliers by the time that demand returns.
The wall is the price of power, the same reason the country struggles to carry its nickel all the way to a finished cell. Bring that cost down and the pre-processing and assembly already happening here could climb higher up the chain. Until then, Philippine nickel keeps sailing out as something close to dirt, while finished cells sail in for the priciest part of every EV sold here.
