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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

#11

Post by cess11 »

christkv wrote: post #6
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.

I think i read that they could not deliver the quality and quantity expected for automobile production. Bad product, overextension and I won’t be surprised if some graft will show up once they start digging. Norway has another such venture where the executive suite pays themselves handily and delivered nothing.

Northvolt also counted on cheap materials from Russia, e.g. infamously environment unfriendly nickel from Norilsk, which clearly didn't pan out after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#12

Post by benchmarkist »

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.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#13

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

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.

This is somewhat true, but I don’t think it is necessarily fair to them. Their strategy was to try to do everything themselves (except raw material mining). By having vertical integration across the battery space, they would be able to hopefully compete on price with the battery giants in China like CATL, while still working out of Europe, which is a lot more expensive in terms of labor costs, and regulation, and everything else. But they didn’t get that far and their biggest customers like BMW started abandoning them while waiting for deliveries to begin. This began the doom spiral. But it is possible that with more money and time this would’ve been the right strategy for the long term competitiveness of the company. Otherwise, if it’s going to be permanently uncompetitive what’s the point? Maybe this was indeed, some kind of scam for government subsidies. But I think it’s more about the difficulty of finding funding to do big things, and to do them properly.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#14

Post by riffraff »

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.

Tesla got a ton of government subsidies, but is successful, there is no causal relation between the two things.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#15

Post by em500 »

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 do with that? They are not standard things, they are things custom made for Northvolt but unfortunately with incomplete specifications. ...

...The whole market is not doing well in Europe. We don't really have the raw materials here (Northvolt's came mostly from China), we don't have the knowledge (that's in Asia) and we don't have the machinery for production. ...

[1] https://old-reddit-com.translate.goog/r/sweden/comments/1g1x...

[2] https://tweakers-net.translate.goog/nieuws/228816/faillissem...

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#16

Post by leviliebvin »

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…

Pfft. Sure blame the Chinese equipment and not the corrupt and incompetent European management. The Chinese manage to produce batteries just fine.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#17

Post by toenail »

riffraff wrote: post #14
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.

Tesla got a ton of government subsidies, but is successful, there is no causal relation between the two things.

Tesla is still getting tons of subsidies, directly and indirectly. We'll see if they are successful once that stops.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#18

Post by leviliebvin »

buckle8017 wrote: post #8
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.

Nothing to learn here, they were just scamming various governments. That's why they promised to expand to so many places, each government subsidized them separately.

Expanding to multiple EU states is a requirement to satisfy the various governments if you are getting public EU funding. See Airbus for an example.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#19

Post by em500 »

leviliebvin wrote: post #16
em500 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pfft. Sure blame the Chinese equipment and not the corrupt and incompetent European management. The Chinese manage to produce batteries just fine.

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.

Re: Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis

#20

Post by smokel »

leviliebvin wrote: post #16
em500 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pfft. Sure blame the Chinese equipment and not the corrupt and incompetent European management. The Chinese manage to produce batteries just fine.

To be fair, the referenced comment (in Dutch) blames management:

> Helaas is het probleem bij Northvolt echt gewoon te herleiden naar slecht management (ex-Tesla), en bijgevolg een slechte keuze van leverancier van productiemachines (Wuxi Lead).

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