By Marie Mannes
Embattled green tech player Northvolt has missed some in-house targets and has curtailed production at its battery cells plant in northern Sweden, according to internal company documents and company sources, underscoring the challenge of ramping up output.
Two unpublished documents reviewed by Reuters, marked “Production plan 2024”, show Northvolt has since early September been consistently missing weekly production goals for shippable cells, or cells deemed good enough to be delivered to clients. They include data as recent as the week ending Nov. 10.
The documents show, along with goals for each week, a target to reach 51,000 deliverable cells in one week by the end of 2024.
Contacted by Reuters, Northvolt said the targets had been set on Sept. 5 and were “long out of date”. It did not elaborate on its current production targets, which it said are based on contracted customer deliveries.
Hailed as Europe’s best chance to weaken China’s overwhelming dominance of the electric vehicle (EV) battery market, Northvolt fired a fifth of its global workforce and shrank its operations in September to stay afloat. The Swedish company, led by former Tesla (NASDAQ:) executive Peter Carlsson, has yet to make a profit.
Northvolt has been discussing the possibility of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Nov. 15. The company declined to comment on the possibility of a Chapter 11 filing.
Hobbled by delays in deliveries and struggling to produce sufficient volumes of high-quality batteries, Northvolt lost a 2 billion euro ($2.1 billion) contract from BMW (ETR:) in June.
A Reuters review of internal production sheets, other company documents, and conversations with four company sources indicate Northvolt continues to face challenges in boosting production levels for battery cells, the units that store and convert chemical energy into electricity.
For example, in the week starting Oct. 21, the company delivered just 22,000 cells deemed shippable against a target of 30,000, the documents, which listed weekly goals until the year-end, show. In the week ending Nov. 10, there were “more than 20,000 shippable cells”, the company told Reuters.
Such production levels contrast with a goal of 100,000 cells per week by year end that the company disclosed to Reuters on Sept. 24 and earlier to employees under its “Path to 100k” roadmap for quality cells.
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