German factory of Chinese battery giant CATL licensed to produce 8GWh cells
Aerial photo taken on Sept. 11, 2019 shows a part of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd. in Ningde, east China's Fujian Province. (Xinhua/Lin Shanchuan)
China's leading automotive lithium-ion battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd. (CATL) on Wednesday announced that its first overseas plant in Thuringia, Germany, has been licensed to produce 8GWh cells, reported Securities Daily Friday.
According to the company, the planned capacity of the plant is 14GWh, and it is now racing to get the first batch of cells off the production line by the end of 2022.
It is introduced that the plant mainly consists of two parts. The G1 part, purchased from another company, is used to assemble the cells into modules, and the G2 part is newly built for the production of cells.
This is not only CATL's first battery factory in Germany, but also the first overseas base for a Chinese battery factory to put into production, said an insider, noting that 8GWh is equivalent to the batteries needed for 120,000 electric vehicles.
It is worth mentioning that the German factory is the most expensive among the ten bases of CATL, nine of which are located in China with a total planned capacity of about 500GWh. The total planned investment for the German plant now stands at 1.8 billion euros.
Under the influence of the global epidemic and supply chain bottlenecks, CATL's German plant still realized the production of the module part at the end of 2021, and will formally produce cells in 2022.