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Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

reuters.com

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Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#31

Post by viraptor »

em500 wrote: post #15
myspy wrote: post #3

So what is the learning here, why did it fail? From the timeline it looks like it spread out too much and didn‘t create a great product first.

Comments from insiders in Swedish[1] and Dutch[2]. Some snippets: ... In the end, they are just in a situation that is almost impossible to save. You have a factory full of machines that are substandard in quality, reliability and documentation. A huge 100% in-house tech stack that largely consists of Go pieces on Lambdas writing to DynamoDB. ... ... A gigantic factory full of mediocre Chinese equipment, what can you…

The tech stack was a weird quote. This is significant:

> In theory it's microservices, but the reality is that there are so many circular dependencies that it works like a monolith

But lambda/go/dynamodb does not force this situation.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#32

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #27
benchmarkist wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profits and subsidies are privatized, losses are socialized. That's how the system is designed to work.

This. The system works just as intended. If the state is throwing free money around why wouldn't you pick it up and pocket it? Your job isn't to create jobs or return on investment, it's to funnel that free state money in the pockets of shareholders. For those looking for another similar example of European subsidized tech failure check the ST-Ericsson story.

China also subsidizes the car and battery industry and in their case, it seems to be working just fine. So a blanket statement of "state subsidies = bad" does not tell the whole story.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#33

Post by ngrilly »

brabel wrote: post #9

Incredibly embarrassing for Europe and Sweden. Even with billions of investments from the big car companies, investors and many millions in subsidies, they simply couldn’t make it work at all. Instead of buying the California startup just to shut it down, should’ve invested most of their money there instead. They are leaving an enormous eyesore in the northern Sweden landscape with thoudands of people unemployed, man…

As far as I know, no executives received “millions of dollars in bonuses”. What is your source? And in Sweden and Europe, people are usually not paid in dollars :)

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#34

Post by throwaway4711 »

NV bought manufacturing equipment for $2B from China, now left in the lurch during bring-up, supplier dragging their heels, sending 3rd rate support engineers. Of course, China doesn't want to support a competitor in Europe...

Classic rogue state hybrid warfare, just as cut cables in baltic, also by Chinese. Plausible deniability all the way.

https://www.newsweek.com/baltic-cable-sabotage-nato-1988689

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#35

Post by ngrilly »

benchmarkist wrote: post #12
brabel wrote: post #9

Incredibly embarrassing for Europe and Sweden. Even with billions of investments from the big car companies, investors and many millions in subsidies, they simply couldn’t make it work at all. Instead of buying the California startup just to shut it down, should’ve invested most of their money there instead. They are leaving an enormous eyesore in the northern Sweden landscape with thoudands of people unemployed, man…

Profits and subsidies are privatized, losses are socialized. That's how the system is designed to work.

Not in that case: https://sifted.eu/articles/northvolt-bankruptcy-investors-cr...

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#36

Post by Cumpiler69 »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #32
Cumpiler69 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The system works just as intended. If the state is throwing free money around why wouldn't you pick it up and pocket it? Your job isn't to create jobs or return on investment, it's to funnel that free state money in the pockets of shareholders. For those looking for another similar example of European subsidized tech failure check the ST-Ericsson story.

China also subsidizes the car and battery industry and in their case, it seems to be working just fine. So a blanket statement of "state subsidies = bad" does not tell the whole story.

Of course, everyone is subsidizing their industries, especially the US and China.

I never made a blanket statement that all state subsidized are bad, I just pointed out some cases of major EU failures which you took as a blanket statement.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#37

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

throwaway4711 wrote: post #34

NV bought manufacturing equipment for $2B from China, now left in the lurch during bring-up, supplier dragging their heels, sending 3rd rate support engineers. Of course, China doesn't want to support a competitor in Europe... Classic rogue state hybrid warfare, just as cut cables in baltic, also by Chinese. Plausible deniability all the way. https://www.newsweek.com/baltic-cable-sabotage-nato-1988689

This is what I’m seeing in social media elsewhere - reports of difficulty getting good support from Chinese suppliers.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#38

Post by baxtr »

clarionbell wrote: post #30

Europe is entering a crisis of unprecedented proportions. This isn't just an isolated incident, one bad company, this is a trend. It used to be that subsidies managed to balance out the over-regulation, high labor costs and powerful pressure groups Europe was known for. Now it's no longer the case. There used to be a technological edge European countries (especially in the west) could rely on, which made them more su…

If Europe as major part of the West continues to fail this is going to happen

- Russian influence will rise and dominate at least major parts of Eastern Europe

- China will expand its footprint in Africa and increase its ambition in Asia

- US and Japan will become more isolated than ever

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#39

Post by ngrilly »

panta wrote: post #21
em500 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Main equipment manufacture was Wuxi Lead, where naturally everyone speaks almost exclusively Chinese and all docs are in Chinese. Not a problem of course when most customers are also Chinese, much more so when they're European.

If you are spending billions, surely you can bring in some people that speak both Chinese and the local language. Heck, there are even real-time translation services now. No, the problem is not technical, it's that it was a scam from the get go.

The goal of a scam is to make the scammer richer. Who gets richer in this case? No one. So that’s not a scam. I’m disappointed seeing that kind of accusations stated without evidences on HN, a forum about entrepreneurship and tech, where we used to celebrate success as much as learn from failure.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#40

Post by atwrk »

toenail wrote: post #4

The promise that needed 1 billion in subsidies to build a new plant? As soon as the government got involved it was clear they couldn't be profitable on their own.

Have you seen China? Northvolts demise is completely orthogonal to the concept of subsidies.
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