Lithium Confidential

Lithium Confidential blends insider history with a personal story of international business, corporate politics, risk-taking, and reinvention. 

Written with candor, humor, and hard-earned perspective, Lithium Confidential is both a personal journey and a rare insider account of the rise of the global lithium-ion battery supply chain. Joe Lowry takes readers from lithium's early days as an obscure industrial material to the emergence of Chinese lithium billionaires from humble beginnings who he worked with long before they found success. Through corporate politics, international negotiations, and cultural clashes across Asia, Lowry provides a firsthand look at how China rose from obscurity to global lithium dominance while Japan faltered and the United States largely slept through the transformation.

At the same time, Lithium Confidential is the story of a North Carolina family whose lives were reshaped by years spent living abroad in Japan and China. Behind the business deals and geopolitical shifts is a story of risk-taking, reinvention, and the challenges of raising a family far from home as Asia reshaped the global economy.