Ultralife Corporation

Ultralife Corporation grew out of Kodak's battery research and went public in 1991 as an independent lithium battery maker, and it has spent the decades since building a business squarely aimed at military and government customers, first through batteries and later through communications hardware as well. The company is headquartered in Newark, New York, trades on the Nasdaq, and reported 671 employees at the end of 2024, a workforce that grew by about a quarter that year as the business expanded. Ultralife organizes itself into two main lines. Battery and energy products cover non-rechargeable lithium batteries, including 9-volt, cylindrical HiRate, and thin-format ThinCell cells, sold mostly to the military and to industrial OEM customers.

These batteries end up inside portable radios, thermal imaging systems, emergency locator beacons, and search and rescue transponders, and the company specifically calls out powering pilot survival radios among its military applications, a niche where a battery's reliability after years of storage matters as much as its performance the moment it's needed. Rechargeable batteries and battery management systems round out the energy side of the business, supporting applications where a single-use cell isn't practical. Communications systems is Ultralife's second major segment, built through both organic development and acquisition, and it serves government and defense customers alongside medical, safety and security, energy, and robotics markets. This side of the business designs and builds communications hardware rather than just the power cells that go inside it, giving Ultralife a foothold in tactical radio and communications equipment markets beyond its original battery business.

The throughline across both segments is a customer base built around military field use, where equipment has to survive extreme temperatures, vibration, and long periods without maintenance, and where a battery or radio failing in the field carries real consequences rather than just an inconvenience. That focus has kept Ultralife supplying the US military and allied forces with primary lithium batteries for decades, even as larger battery makers have chased consumer and automotive markets that dwarf the defense battery business in dollar terms. Ultralife's smaller scale compared to a company like EnerSys means its business is more concentrated, and its growth has come from expanding within its established defense and government battery and communications niche rather than diversifying broadly into industrial or automotive power. That focus has made it a recognized, if modestly sized, name in military battery supply chains, particularly for the portable radio, beacon, and survival radio applications where its lithium cells have been a standard choice for years.