Northvolt is a company you may not have heard of, but it's a big player in the battery industry. Think about it, how can a company that has been established for less than ten years get so much huge financing in a row, and it seems that it has been expanding factories and buying equipment, but not many people can say the specific results?
Since the beginning of 2017, the name Northvolt has been shining in the battery industry. At that time, they had only been established for three months and had received 12 million euros in financing, which was not a small amount for a new company.
Then, as if they had opened a hanging, they ran all the way, as if money would never be a problem. In 2019, Northvolt won a huge $1.015 billion Series A financing in one fell swoop, and there are many heavyweights on the investor list, such as the global auto giant Volkswagen Group.
This money may be a distant dream for many established tech companies, but Northvolt has made it. This has skyrocketed expectations for them, after all, who doesn't want to see the next market disruptor?
However, as time went on, it became clear that while Northvolt was quite active in expanding capacity and raising capital, their market performance was tepid.
It wasn't until May 2022 that Northvolt announced its first product deliveries, but the specifics such as who to deliver and how much they were delivered, they didn't go into details. This makes people wonder if this company has real results?
In contrast, CATL has grown from scratch in a similar period of time and has become the leader of the global power battery market, ranking first in global lithium battery shipments for seven consecutive years.
Some other up-and-comers, such as Haichen Energy Storage and Chuneng New Energy, also achieved large-scale production in only about two years and successfully delivered large-scale projects. In this comparison, Northvolt's performance is a bit awkward.
However, just when everyone was wondering about the company's future, at the beginning of 2023, Northvolt shocked the industry once again - they announced the completion of a funding round of up to $5 billion.
There are no stringent VAM rules or repurchase agreements in this financing, and it seems that investors have a lot of trust in Northvolt, or rather, are optimistic about their future potential.
This level of trust is really rare. Investors include the Swedish Debt Office, Crédit France, and the Export-Import Bank of Korea, which have entered into a non-recourse project financing agreement.
Put simply, they believe that Northvolt's future earnings and assets will be sufficient to repay this huge loan. The confidence and risks behind such a decision can be imagined.
After all these years of ups and downs, Northvolt is still building factories, buying equipment, and expanding production capacity. It's as if their goal is to keep moving forward and expanding.
But the real feedback from the market and the competitiveness of the product do not seem to be as high as expected. The contrast between this is like a wonderful movie, and people can't help but wonder about the next plot.