According to industry sources, LG Energy Solution, a battery company owned by LG Chemical, will supply Ni-Co-mn-Al (NCMA) quaternary batteries to Tesla next year. It will also be the first battery supplier to produce NCMA batteries for electric vehicles.
LG Energy Solution has said it will start production of the 90 per cent nickel battery in the second half of 2021. However, on whether to supply the battery to Tesla, a company spokesman said: "We cannot confirm this because we cannot disclose the names of our customers."
It is reported that LG Chemical officially divided its battery business from December 1 this year, setting up a new company separately, specializing in battery business, LG New Energy (LG Energy Solution) was officially established, and Jin Zhong, former president of LG chemical battery business, is now the CEO of the company. After the spin-off, LG Chemical will hold a 100 per cent stake in the new company.
LG New Energy is expected to have sales of 13 trillion won this year and plans to achieve sales of more than 30 trillion won in 2024, making it the world's leading provider of energy solutions. To this end, the company will timely expand investment, strengthen business competitiveness, and lead the market with innovative high-performance products and leading engineering technologies such as intelligent factories.
It is also reported that LG Energy Solutions is investing more efforts to become Tesla's main supplier of cylindrical batteries. To achieve this, LG is seeking to expand its No. 2170 battery production line at its Nanjing plant and invest an additional $500m in the Nanjing plant. After this investment, LG Chemical's total investment in Nanjing will exceed 2 trillion won (about 1.8 billion yuan). The investment will be completed by the end of 2022, half of which will be completed in June 2020.
LG Chemical has two plants in Nanjing, one of which is responsible for the production of 18650 cylindrical cells used in the domestic version of Model 3. LG Chemical plans to increase its annual production capacity to 32GWh by 2023.
