US battery developer Lyten has been given the green light to acquire Swedish battery cell manufacturer Northvolt. The final outstanding approval was granted by the Swedish authority ISP, which oversees strategic products. The acquisition is now expected to be completed by the end of October.
It came as quite a surprise when Lyten announced in early August that it intended to take over Northvolt’s sites in Sweden and Germany. After all, the San Jose, California-based company, founded in 2015, was significantly smaller than Northvolt, and develops and manufactures lithium-sulphur batteries, while Northvolt relies on NMC cell chemistry.
However, the takeover plans make sense to regulators and are now becoming more and more concrete. With approval from the Swedish Inspektionen för strategiska produkter (ISP), Lyten now has all the approvals it needs to take over Northvolt. According to Northvolt’s insolvency administrator Mikael Kubu, the takeover can therefore be completed by the end of October.
This means that Lyten will also take over the Northvolt factory currently under construction in Heide, Schleswig-Holstein. The plant is expected to have an annual battery production capacity of 15 GWh. Northvolt itself had planned to create around 3,000 jobs at the Northvolt Drei plant in Heide, plus 6,000 to 7,000 jobs at suppliers and service providers. However, it is unclear to what extent Lyten intends to stick to these plans. In addition, construction had not really progressed very far for a long time – as recently as May, Northvolt was still talking mainly about infrastructure measures, preparing the site for the actual construction of a battery factory.
It remains unclear what will happen to the €700 million in subsidies that the federal government and the state of Schleswig-Holstein had promised Northvolt for the project in Heide. It is not yet clear whether this sum can be transferred to Lyten. Northvolt had previously received €600 million in subsidies, which are now part of the insolvency proceedings.
In order to rapidly advance its expansion in Europe, Lyten presented its European management team at the beginning of September. These are mainly former Northvolt managers who are moving to Lyten. And its previous main customer, Scania, which switched to CATL batteries due to the insolvency, has already signalled that it is interested in Northvolt batteries again in the future and has confirmed initial talks with the future owner.
Conversely, Lyten has suffered a setback in Canada: Lyten actually wants to build a factory planned by Northvolt there as well, but the province of Québec has withdrawn from the project and does not want to pay any further subsidies.
ndr.de
