Originally spun off from Great Wall Motors' battery division, SVOLT now plans to focus its European presence on technical services, warehousing, engineering support, logistics and maintenance. In other words, it's scaling back from ambitious manufacturing to just enough infrastructure to maintain a foothold in the region.
The move kills two planned facilities in Germany - a module and package assembly plant in Saarland and a cell manufacturing plant in Brandenburg. The pack plant was first announced in late 2020, with an investment of 2 billion euros ($2.16 billion). It was expected to produce up to 24 GHw of packs per year and be operational by mid-2024, but has been delayed. The battery cell plant was announced in 2022 and would have been SVOLT's first overseas cell plant. It was scheduled to begin production in 2025.
Despite being China's eighth-largest battery maker with a 2.36% share of the local market, SVOLT has struggled to gain traction at home and abroad. Financial constraints appear to be at the root of the problem. The company had planned to go public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR market in late 2022, but those plans were officially scrapped last December.
Source: Cnevpost