Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thank you, Mr. Air, a netizen of CTOnews.com, for your clue delivery! CTOnews.com, July 3 (Xinhua) Panasonic Energy CTO Chuangichiro Watanabe recently confirmed in an exclusive interview with Reuters that Panasonic Energy needs to build about four new factories by fiscal year 2030 to meet the growing demand for electric vehicle batteries.

▲ picture shows Panasonic Energy's automotive cylindrical lithium-ion battery Panasonic Energy currently mainly supplies batteries to the US electric car Tesla and is also in talks with Mazda. Panasonic plans to quadruple car battery capacity to 200GWh by fiscal year 2030 compared with fiscal year 2022.

Watanabe did not mention potential construction sites, but said 200GWh was the "minimum requirement" for competition as a major car battery maker in North America. He added: "basically, the way in which battery manufacturers invest entirely in factories is no longer applicable." The statement also hinted that Panasonic might co-invest and operate with automakers to build a battery supply chain for "local production and local consumption".

Global demand for automotive batteries is expected to surge from about 4 trillion yen (CTOnews.com Note: about 201.6 billion yuan) in 2019 to about 53 trillion yen (about 2.67 trillion yuan) in 2050, according to data from Japan's Ministry of economy, Trade and Industry. Chinese and South Korean battery companies, which are expanding their market share, are also planning to build new factories in the United States.

Panasonic is trying to expand its supply beyond Tesla after it announced contracts with Lucid, a fledgling US electric car maker, and Hexagon Purus, a Norwegian developer of battery systems for commercial electric vehicles.

Jiang Zehou, an analyst at Citigroup Securities, said: "until the beginning of this year, many investors thought Panasonic's battery business could not be evaluated because it was completely dependent on Tesla." But he also points out that Panasonic needs to scale up its production of car batteries to change investors' minds.

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