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Northvolt has agreed to sell its industrial battery unit to Swedish truckmaker Scania, strengthening ties between the two companies as Europe’s troubled battery maker grapples with financial difficulties.
The Swedish battery start-up said on Tuesday that it had agreed the sale of its industrial battery business, based in Gdańsk, Poland, which supplies batteries to customers in mining, agriculture, and construction equipment manufacturing.
The sale follows Northvolt’s Chapter 11 filing in November, brought about by severe production delays at its factory in the sub-Arctic town of Skellefteå, which left Europe’s biggest battery hope scrambling to find up to $1.2bn to exit bankruptcy and preceded the resignation of its co-founder Peter Carlsson as chief executive.
The company — of which German carmaker Volkswagen owns about one-fifth — has since been speaking to potential partners to help secure its future. Late last month, Northvolt announced that it was handing full ownership of Novo Energy to its joint-venture partner Volvo Cars. The two businesses also signed a framework agreement to “explore how they could work together in the future, including potential future supply opportunities in North America”.
Neither Northvolt nor Scania disclosed the size of the deal but the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet wrote that Northvolt would be paid less than SKr100mn (€8.9mn) — significantly lower than the SKr1.6bn (€143mn) that Northvolt in 2021 said it would invest in building the Gdansk plant.
