On September 1, Slovakian battery manufacturer InoBat announced on its official website that Gotion Hi-Tech and InoBat signed an investment agreement in Hefei on August 23, and Gotion High-Tech has acquired 25% of InoBat's equity.
InoBat did not disclose financial terms, but said it was the first major investment by a top Chinese global battery maker in a leading European start-up.
40GWh cooperation has been reached
According to the data, InoBat is a battery manufacturer engaged in pioneering research and development, manufacturing and recycling of batteries, and is committed to providing general and customized solutions for passenger cars, commercial vehicles, racing cars and aerospace equipment. The company has been supported by many strategic investors and partners such as Rio Tinto Group, India's Amara Raja Group, American Ideanomics Corporation, International Finance Corporation (IFC), IPM Group, etc., and has been selected into the European Commission's "Important Project of Common Interests in Europe (IPCEI)" , received R&D grant financing, with additional support from the Slovakian government.
Gotion Hi-Tech and InoBat reached a strategic cooperation in February this year, and this equity acquisition may be a preparation for the implementation of subsequent battery projects.
On February 5 this year, Gotion Hi-Tech announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Hefei Gotion, signed a memorandum of understanding with InoBat. change.
According to the agreement, the two parties will carry out cooperation and discussions in various fields such as manufacturing and technology research and development.
In the field of cell manufacturing, the two parties will jointly explore the construction of a 40GWh cell and Pack factory in the form of a joint venture; in the field of technical cooperation, they will cooperate based on their respective advantages in the field of lithium iron phosphate and ternary batteries; in the field of energy storage, the two parties will cooperate based on InoBat has an existing factory in Slovakia, and jointly explores the potential of energy storage battery production, so as to open up the European market as soon as possible.
In addition, the two parties are also committed to establishing technical and commercial cooperation in the operation of the facility, and jointly discussing the feasibility of recycling production waste and end-of-life batteries.
In addition to building a battery cell factory with Gotion Hi-Tech , InoBat plans to build a super factory in Western Europe and Eastern Europe.
In October last year, foreign media reported that InoBat had signed a statement of intent with the Spanish government to build a super factory in Valladolid. However, the announcement is not a final agreement, with other sites, including the UK, still under consideration for InoBat's Western European plants.
In November, Reuters London reported that InoBat said it had signed a letter of intent with the Serbian government to build an electric vehicle battery factory in Serbia with a production capacity of up to 32GWh.
The plant will start production in 2025 with an initial capacity of 4GWh. InoBat also said the Serbian government had agreed to provide up to 419 million euros in funding, including grants and tax incentives, to support the battery plant project.
Guoxuan's Overseas Strategy Accelerates
In 2022, Gotion Hi-Tech anchors the two major markets in Europe and the United States, and covers the Asia-Pacific market. On the one hand, it accelerates the global production capacity layout. The total production capacity in 2022 is about 100GWh. However, according to Gotion's plan, the company's total production capacity will reach 300GWh by the end of 2025, of which overseas production capacity will be about 100GWh.
Entering 2023, Gotion Hi-Tech 's globalization strategy is advancing at a high speed, and the production capacity and orders of power batteries and energy storage have been progressing continuously since the beginning of the year.
In terms of power battery capacity construction, in addition to the latest capacity cooperation with InoBat, Gotion Hi-Tech and Vietnam VinGroup's Vietnam base phase 1 5GWh lithium iron phosphate battery plant is expected to be put into production by the end of 2023. However, on January 3 this year, Guoxuan High-Tech stated on the investor interaction platform that the production capacity of the plant will match the demand for VinFast new energy vehicles and make corresponding expansion and dynamic adjustments.
At the Gotion Hi-Tech Media Open Day event held on April 28, Chen Ruilin, vice president of international business, revealed that Gotion Hi-Tech plans to establish two production bases in the United States, one of which produces batteries and the other produces battery materials.
In addition, Singapore Gotion, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gotion, and NuovoPlus agreed to build a power lithium-ion battery Pack base in Thailand last year. It is expected that by the fourth quarter of this year, the first phase of the production line of the base will be put into operation and supply to the market.
In terms of power battery orders, Gotion and its subsidiaries grasped the delivery and billing with both hands: Tongcheng Gotion successfully sent 2,000 sets of battery packs to the United States; Yichun Gotion and Liuzhou Gotion also received orders of up to 2GWh from VinFast vehicles in Vietnam; and EJIT strategic cooperation, entered the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance supplier system and supplied.
In terms of energy storage business, on January 11, the Gendome portable energy storage power supply developed by Gotion Hi-Tech for overseas markets was launched on the overseas crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, and the sales exceeded 100,000 US dollars within 24 hours.
On March 15, Gotion Hi-Tech and Japan Edison Energy reached a strategic cooperation agreement, and the two parties will jointly develop the Japanese energy storage and recycling market.
Thanks to the accelerated deployment of overseas layout, in the first half of this year, Gotion Hi-Tech achieved operating income of 3.062 billion yuan in overseas regions, a year-on-year increase of 296.74%, which has greatly exceeded the scale of overseas revenue for the whole year of 2022. The proportion of overseas business revenue in the company's total revenue has increased from 8.94% in the first half of 2022 to the current 20.09%.
In Summary
Lithium battery companies going overseas is not only a part of the globalization strategy, but also the key to opening up the second growth space. There is no doubt that the international market has become a strategic location for the development planning of Chinese power battery enterprises.
With the cooperation with InoBat, Gotion Hi-Tech 's overseas layout has accumulated nine stations, namely Germany, the United States, Switzerland, Argentina, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan and Slovakia.
