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Electric car battery maker CATL plans to build factory in Germany
Deal will be viewed as controversial within EU as China and South Korea already dominate the global electric car battery market
Michael Marray 4 Jul 2018
Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd (CATL), the biggest lithium car battery manufacturer in China, is planning to set up a factory in Germany, following the signing of a multi-billion dollar contract to supply batteries to BMW.
This will be viewed as a controversial move from within the European Union. China and South Korea already dominate the global electric car battery market, and concerns about overdependence on Asian suppliers have led to calls for Europe to develop a competing manufacturing alliance.
In a speech at the Intersolar and Electrical Energy Storage Europe 2018 event in Munich on June 21, European Commissioner for Energy Union Maros Sefcovic said that there is one critical and strategic component in Europe's e-mobility value chain which is still weak- namely batteries. "If we do not want to give away this strategically important sector we must manufacture batteries here in Europe," Sefcovic said.
The Commission has been working on an EU Battery Alliance and an EU Action plan on green batteries. Under the Action Plan, the EU is taking a proactive approach to critical raw materials to boost its strategic independence. It is mapping and exploring EU resources (significant unexplored potential in 13 EU countries), facilitating access to secondary raw materials through recycling in a circular economy of batteries, and setting up free trade agreements securing fair and sustainable access to raw materials from resource rich countries outside the EU. There is also EU money available for research projects.
A European presence in battery manufacturing has been publicly supported by German Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy Peter Altmaier, and by Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure Andreas Scheuer.
However, in an interview with German business daily Handelsblatt, BMW Chief Executive Officer Harald Krueger said, that though talk of a European battery alliance was encouraging, this would be meaningful only if it was competitive, and in the meantime he must plan ahead with battery making partners that are already available.
BMW will use so called fifth generation batteries for its iNext electric powered car, which is set to come onto the market in 2021. It has developed these batteries in close co-operation with CATL. BMW has 25 electric models in its development pipeline, and will work with various suppliers, including Samsung,
Krueger confirmed that CATL has plans to build a factory somewhere in Europe. Local media say that it will be located near Erfurt in Thuringen, with most of the initial production being supplied to the BMW plant in Dingolfing, Bavaria.
The powerful German Trade Union IG Metall has also called for a European consortium to make electric car batteries. And German Chancellor Angela Merkel has addressed the issue, saying that if Europe lacked a home grown battery industry, then it would have smaller share in the value-added chain of the car industry in the future. 
CATL, which was founded in 2001, is headquartered in Ningde, Fujian Province. On June 11 the company made an Initial Public Offering on the ChiNext board at the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, selling a 10% stake and raising the equivalent of US$850 million.
The shares soared by 44% on the first day of trading, and have since almost tripled from the RMB25.14 IPO price to reach RMB71.96 on June 29.   
On June 28 another Chinese battery maker, BYD, opened its new factory in Qinghai province, which can produce 24 gigawatt-hours of batteries a year. It intends to increase the company's overall production capacity to 60 GWh by 2020. BYD's existing factories are in Shenzhen and Huizhou.
In addition to batteries, BYD manufacturers electric buses and trucks. It has more than 35,000 buses in service, mainly in China but increasingly in export markets. BYD was the number one seller of new energy vehicles in the world between 2015 and 2017.
The company offers a wide variety of battery products, such as consumer 3C batteries, power batteries, solar cells and energy storage batteries, and has a complete battery ecosystem. In addition to applications in new energy vehicles and rail transportation, BYD's battery products are widely used in solar power stations, energy storage power stations and many other new energy solutions.
BYD and UK based Alexander Dennis Ltd (ADL) recently won the largest part of London's first order for fully electric double deckers. Thirty seven BYD ADL Enviro400EV buses will enter service with Transport for London (TfL) operator Metroline in the second quarter of 2019.
The finished buses will be assembled in Britain by ADL. They will use BYD's Iron-Phosphate battery technology, which enables the buses to run all day on a single charge using off-peak electricity. Already in October 2015 BYD supplied Metroline with five Chinese-built double deckers.
Photo: CATL

    

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