Case Study: Market Sizing Case Study: Sizing an EV Battery Opportunity

This market sizing case study shows how a battery-technology firm put a defensible number on its opportunity before a fundraise, in a market that grew 25% in a single year yet saw its per-unit price fall by a fifth over the same period. EV battery demand passed 950 GWh in 2024, but the client could not raise on a headline that big and that blunt — investors wanted the slice it could actually serve, priced against a collapsing cost curve and a patent field the incumbents have held for two decades. The work was to turn one enormous number into three the board could defend.

The Challenge

The client had a genuine battery innovation — a cell-and-pack thermal and management approach aimed at fast-charging EV packs — and a board that wanted to raise against it. The obvious market number was intimidatingly large and, for exactly that reason, useless: EV battery demand had passed 950 GWh in 2024, growing about 25% on the year, and total battery demand across EVs and stationary storage had crossed the one-terawatt-hour milestone. Quoting a slice of a terawatt-hour tells an investor nothing about what this company can win.

Worse, the market was moving in two directions at once. BloombergNEF’s 2024 survey found volume-weighted lithium-ion pack prices had fallen 20% in a single year to a record $115 per kilowatt-hour — the steepest drop since 2017. So the market was growing fast in gigawatt-hours while shrinking in dollars per unit.

A market sizing case study built on volume alone would have overstated the opportunity; one built on value alone would have missed the scale. The client needed both, plus an honest read of how much of the field was already spoken for. That was the mandate we took: not ‘how big is the EV battery market’, but ‘how big is the part of it this company can defensibly serve, and in what currency’.

Our Approach

We ran the mandate through our standard market sizing method, adapted for a hardware market where unit volume and unit value have decoupled and where the serviceable slice is bounded as much by patents as by demand.

• Sized in two currencies, not one. We built the total available market twice — once in gigawatt-hours from IEA demand data, once in dollars using the BloombergNEF pack-price curve — because a rising-volume, falling-price market grows and shrinks at the same time, and a single-currency TAM hides that.
• Worked bottom-up, cross-checked top-down. The served market was built from the segment the client actually touches — thermal and battery-management content per pack — as an attach rate on GWh shipped, then reconciled against a top-down cut of the reported battery market so the two methods had to agree before we trusted either.
• Split the market by geography. China accounted for 59% of EV batteries in 2024, with the EU and the US at roughly 13% each; a serviceable market that ignored where the cells are actually made would have counted customers the client could never reach, so we weighted the SAM by manufacturing region rather than by end-vehicle sales.
• Overlaid the patent landscape on the serviceable slice. Using the EPO/IEA innovation study, we priced in the incumbency: Japan held 40.9% of battery patent families over 2000–2018, South Korea 17.4%, Europe 15.4% and the US 14.5%. For the adjacent solid-state frontier we flagged Toyota’s 1,331-patent lead. The obtainable market (SOM) was then drawn as the intersection of demand, region and freedom to operate — not demand alone.

What This Market Sizing Case Study Found

Sized properly, the one big number split into three that told very different stories.

• The volume market is enormous and accelerating. At 950+ GWh in 2024 and 25% annual growth, with electric cars alone driving over 85% of battery demand, the gigawatt-hour TAM justified the client’s ambition on its own.
• The value market is being compressed underneath it. The same year’s 20% pack-price fall to $115/kWh meant the dollar TAM was growing far more slowly than the volume TAM — and in the client’s content layer, where price follows the pack, the revenue-per-GWh the company could expect was falling. Sizing in dollars alone would have looked like a stagnant market; sizing in GWh alone would have looked like a boom. Both were true.
• The serviceable slice is bounded by geography and IP, not demand. With 59% of cells made in China, the realistically addressable customer base outside a China-manufacturing strategy was a fraction of the headline. And the patent overlay showed the ground was old and held — a Japan-and-Korea-led field where a newcomer’s obtainable share depended on a defensible position, not on market growth.
• The real opportunity was a defensible niche, not a share of the whole. The client’s fast-charge thermal-management content sat in a layer thinner than the crowded cell-chemistry core, and its own filings gave it room the commodity cell market did not. That niche — small as a percentage of the terawatt-hour, meaningful in dollars and defensible on patents — was the number worth raising against.

The Outcome

The client walked away with a three-layer market model rather than a single headline: a gigawatt-hour TAM that showed scale, a dollar TAM that showed the price reality underneath it, and a patent-and-region-bounded SOM that showed what the company could actually win. Each figure carried its source, so the board could defend it in a room full of investors who had heard the terawatt-hour number too.

Just as usefully, the model told the client what not to claim. A raise pitched on a slice of the whole EV battery market would have collapsed under the first question about the 20% price drop or China’s 59% manufacturing share. Anchoring the story instead to the defensible thermal-management niche — sized in dollars, weighted by reachable region and checked against the patent field — gave a smaller number that survived scrutiny. In a market sizing case study, the figure that holds up in diligence is worth more than the biggest figure you can justify on a slide.

The solid-state frontier was handled the same way. Rather than fold a speculative next-generation market into the raise, we time-stamped it: Toyota’s 1,331-patent lead marks the cost of entry, so we flagged solid-state as an adjacency to revisit once the client’s own filings and the standards picture matured, not a number to bank today.

What This Means for Similar Matters

The lesson that generalises beyond batteries is that in a fast-commoditising hardware market, you must size in units and in value, because the two can move in opposite directions — a market can grow 25% in volume and shrink in price at the same time, and a market sizing case study that reports only one currency will mislead whoever relies on it.

The second lesson is that the serviceable and obtainable markets are drawn by geography and by the patent landscape, not by demand: a terawatt-hour of demand you cannot reach or cannot defend is not your market. Size the slice you can win, price it in the currency your revenue actually lands in, and show the incumbency you are entering against.

How We Sized the EV Battery Market, Step by Step

Because the numbers pull in opposite directions, the sequence matters as much as the sources. We worked the market from the outside in, and refused to collapse the layers into a single figure until each had been tested on its own.

• Step one — fix the volume boundary. We started from the gigawatt-hour demand the industry actually shipped, because volume is the one number in this market that is not distorted by price. At 950+ GWh in 2024 and 25% growth, with electric cars accounting for more than 85% of that demand, the volume envelope told us the ceiling was real before we spent a day on value.
• Step two — convert to value with the live price curve. We then re-expressed the same volume in dollars using the current pack price, not a historical average. At $115/kWh in 2024, down 20% on the year, the dollar market grew far more slowly than the volume market — and in the client’s content layer, revenue-per-GWh was falling with the pack. This is where a naive TAM goes wrong: multiply GWh growth by an old price and you invent revenue that the market has already competed away.
• Step three — strip the market down to what is reachable. With 59% of cells manufactured in China and the EU and US at roughly 13% each, we cut the served market to the regions the client could actually supply, rather than the regions where the vehicles are eventually sold. That single adjustment removed most of the headline before any patent analysis began.
• Step four — bound the reachable market by the patent field. Only then did we overlay the incumbency — a field where Japan and South Korea together held nearly 60% of battery patent families over 2000–2018 — and draw the obtainable market as the slice the client could both reach and defend. What survived all four cuts was small against the terawatt-hour, but it was a number that answered the investor’s real question.

The discipline of the sequence is what makes a market sizing case study defensible: each cut is sourced, each cut is reversible if an assumption changes, and no cut is hidden inside a single blended headline that a diligence team cannot take apart.

Why This Was a Representative Engagement

This case study is a representative scenario built from PerspireIP’s market sizing method and from publicly verifiable data — the IEA Global EV Outlook 2025 battery demand figures, the BloombergNEF 2024 lithium-ion price survey, the EPO/IEA study on innovation in batteries and electricity storage, and the Nikkei/Patent Result solid-state patent ranking cited below. The client, the specific product content and the internal figures are illustrative; the method, the market facts and the analytical sequence are exactly what a real EV battery market sizing engagement follows.

Data Sources

The market and patent data referenced above comes from:

• IEA — Global EV Outlook 2025: Electric Vehicle Batteries — EV battery demand passed 950 GWh in 2024 (+25% year on year); electric cars drove over 85% of demand; China accounted for 59% of EV batteries, the EU and US roughly 13% each — the volume market and its geography.
• BloombergNEF — 2024 Lithium-Ion Battery Price Survey — Volume-weighted lithium-ion pack prices fell 20% in 2024 to a record $115/kWh, the steepest decline since 2017 — the cost curve that decoupled the dollar market from the gigawatt-hour market.
• EPO / IEA — Innovation in Batteries and Electricity Storage — Battery and storage international patent families grew ~14% a year from 2005–2018; batteries were 88% of storage patenting; regional shares 2000–2018 were Japan 40.9%, South Korea 17.4%, Europe 15.4%, US 14.5%, China 6.9% — the incumbency bounding the serviceable slice.
• Nikkei / Patent Result — Solid-State Battery Patent Ranking — Of solid-state battery patents filed with WIPO through March 2022, Toyota led with 1,331, Panasonic 445 and Idemitsu Kosan 272; Japanese firms held six of the top ten — the entry cost of the next-generation adjacency.

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Related PerspireIP work: Market Sizing & Opportunity Analysis · EV & Battery Technology Patent Research · Battery Technology Scouting Case Study.

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