A123 Batteries

choi

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Don Lee, Break-through MIT Battery Maker Tries 'Made in USA' -- Betting U.S.
Manufacturing Can Rise Again. Los Angeles Times, Apr. 29, 2010.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-battery-manufacturing-20100429,0,4963489.story

My comment:
(a) Yet-Ming Chiang 蔣業明
, who is listed as "founder" in "Management" page of A123 Systems Inc. (http://www.a123systems.com)
http://ir.a123systems.com/management.cfm
, but not in the Board of Directors.


Yet-Ming Chiang, Kyocera Professor of Ceramics, Dept of Materials Science
and Engineering, MIT
http://dmse.mit.edu/faculty/faculty/ychiang/

(b) A123 teams up with GM partner in China. Boston Globe, Dec. 18, 2010.
http://www.boston.com/business/markets/articles/2009/12/18/a123_teams_up_with_gm_partner_in_china/

(c) Changzhou 江苏省常州市

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choi

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Compare BYD with A123?

(1) At first I was tempted to say A123 and BYD were competitors in batteries
--and by extension, electric cars.

This is because "A123 teams up with GM partner in China" (my comment (b) in
the original posting). The GM partner at issue is SAIC 上海汽车工业(集团)总
公司, which passed over BYD's batteries.

See also
Fang Yan, Rujun Shen and Jacqueline Wong, China's SAIC to roll out hybrid
cars this year. Reuters, Apr. 8, 2010.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTOE63708R20100408

(2) However, this analysis indicates battery is almost an afterthought for
BYD nowadays.

John Petersen, A123 vs. BYD and Other Irrational Battery Investments.
Seeking Alpha, Oct. 25, 2009.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/168656-a123-vs-byd-and-other-irrational-battery-investments

Quote:

"At the time [when Warren Buffet bought a 10% stake in September 2008], BYD
was generating roughly $4 billion in annual sales that included $1.6 billion
in cell phone components (43%), $1.3 billion in automobiles (31%) and $1.1
billion in batteries (26%). For the first six months of 2009, auto sales
more than doubled to $1.3 billion (55%), cell phone components remained flat
at $780 million (33%), and batteries fell by a third to $281 million (12%).
While it started out as a battery manufacturer, BYD is currently an
automaker first, a cell phone manufacturer second and a battery manufacturer
by default because it needs the batteries for its core product lines.

Note:
(a) Seeking Alpha
http://seekingalpha.com/article/5824-about-seeking-alpha
("Seeking Alpha is the leading provider of stock market opinion and analysis
from blogs, money managers and investment newsletters, and a provider of
its own high-value, complementary financial content. ('Alpha' is a finance
term referring to a stock's performance relative to the market; it's used
more loosely by fund managers to describe beating their index, so every
stock picker is 'seeking alpha.'")
(b) Mr. Petersen's article mentioned "To create a baseline for comparisons,
I'll start with Exide Technologies (XIDE) and Enersys (ENS), the two largest
pure-play battery manufacturers in the world." These two companies make
lead-acid battery only.*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-acid_battery
("Lead-acid batteries, invented in 1859 by French physicist Gaston Planté,
are the oldest type of rechargeable battery")

* Headquarters of Exide and EnerSys are at Milton, Georgia (near Atlanta)
and Reading, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia suburb), respectively.

And BYD and A123 make lithium-ion battery only.

【 在 choi 的大作中提到: 】
: Don Lee, Break-through MIT Battery Maker Tries 'Made in USA' -- Betting U.S.
: Manufacturing Can Rise Again. Los Angeles Times, Apr. 29, 2010.
: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-battery-manufacturing-20100429,0,4963489.story
: (以下引言省略...)

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