Automotive Battery Cell Industry

choi

Yuliya Chernova, Battery Companies in Need of a Boost: They started off with such promise. Now they're trying to figure out how to survive. Wall Street Journal, Dec 5, 2011.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 51832763572816.html

Quote:

(a) "The troubles have some experts worrying that the fledgling [battery cell] industry could face the same fate as domestic solar-panel makers, which have suffered a series of high-profile failures.

(b) "But the battery market has proved challenging for the newcomers. Because the field is so young, battery makers are dependent on only a handful of potential customers. Manufacturing is expensive and needs large-scale production to bring down unit costs, while current demand is uneven.

"Consider the travails of Ener1 Inc, which has received about $55 million of the $118 million Recovery Act grant for which it qualified. The company recently was delisted from Nasdaq and replaced its management team after its chief customer, Think Global, missed sales targets for its small electric car and filed for bankruptcy protection.

(c) "Those losses to foreign competitors point to a larger issue facing U.S. manufacturers: Korean and Japanese companies have a big head start in this market. They've been making lithium-ion batteries for consumer electronics for at least 20 years—and they've been aggressively moving to leverage that experience to serve the electric-vehicle market. LG Chem, for instance, has built the world's largest battery plant for electric cars and has said it will spend about $1.84 billion on a plant in Korea and one in the U.S.

"Asian companies have a cost advantage over the newer U.S. companies. According to estimates by Dilip Warrier, an analyst at investment bank Stifel Financial Corp, A123's cost of building batteries is about $1,000 per kilowatt-hour, while some Asian manufacturers are bidding as low as $400.

My comment:
(a) This is an interesting report, but one need not read the rest. Quotation above probably are all there are about Japanese and Korean companies in the text (table is another matter, see next), which does not mention China.
(b) The report carries a table:

"World Leaders
The top makers of automotive lithium-ion batteries by volume shipped in megawatt-hours, 2011

Company...............................................Based.......Volume shipped
Automotive Energy Supply Corp[1]......Japan........966
BYD Co..................................................China........400
LG Chem Ltd.........................................Korea........221
Lithium Energy Japan [2]......................Japan.........99  
Ener1 Inc...............................................US..............26
Primearth EV Energy Co [3]..................Japan..........11
Toshiba Corp.........................................Japan..........11
Sanyo Electric Co..................................Japan...........10

1 Joint venture of Nissan Motor Co, NEC Corp and NEC Tokin Corp  
2 Joint venture of GS Yuasa Corp, Mitsubishi Corp and Mitsubishi Motors Corp  
3 Joint venture of Panasonic Corp and Toyota Motor Corp

Note: Volume data is for actual shipments through October, estimates for November-December.
Source: Institute of Information Ltd, Japan"
(c) NEC Tokin Corp  ＮＥＣトーキン株式会社
http://www.nec-tokin.com
(founded in 1938 as 東北金属工業株式会社; name changed in 1988 to 株式会社トーキン; merged with NEC; based in 仙台市, located at Japan's Tohoku 東北)

Tokin is 東金, short for 東北金属.
(d) A few years back, my impression, from reading US media, was there was a break-through in lithium ion cell. If I was wrong, I do not know why US companies piled into this business.
(e) BYD sells a lot of automotive lithium-ion batteries--not just small one for electronic devices such as computers. So I am puzzled why it can not make its own electric cars (they are selling a small number of electric bus in China and US).