Japan's NEC Corporation will withdraw from the lithium-ion battery business. In the field of on-board lithium batteries for pure electric vehicles, battery manufacturers in China, Japan and South Korea are making huge investments to continuously promote the survival of the fittest.
According to the forecast of Fuji Keizai, a Japanese research company, the global market size of on-board batteries for pure electric vehicles will reach 6.6 trillion yen in 2025, five times that of 2016.
Panasonic, the world's first in the field of automotive lithium batteries, has customers such as Tesla and Toyota in the United States, and continues to make huge investments. On the other hand, NEC's battery supply target is basically only Nissan, and Nissan has decided to expand the battery procurement target. NEC judged that the investment burden to continue the business was not meaningful.
This time NEC will sell its electrode manufacturing subsidiary NEC Energy Device. This subsidiary mainly produces electrodes for the on-board batteries of Nissan's pure electric vehicle "LEAF", with an estimated annual sales of about 15 billion yen.
NEC also agreed to sell its battery subsidiary, Automotive Energy Supply (AESC), a joint venture with Nissan, to GSR Capital, which had previously held acquisition talks with Nissan. AESC's investment ratio is Nissan 51%, NEC and NEC Energy Device 49%.
