On the evening of March 26, SZXY, a leading manufacturer of lithium battery separator materials in China, issued an announcement that the company and Northvolt intend to sign a supply contract, stipulating that the company will supply lithium-ion battery separators to Northvolt, with the contract amount not exceeding 3.34 billion yuan.
Northvolt is a lithium-ion battery company located in Stockholm, Sweden. As early as March last year, SZXY signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the company. The cooperation content is that SZXY will build a lithium-ion battery diaphragm factory in Europe to support Northvolt lithium-ion battery production. To carry out extensive and in-depth cooperation in business and technology development to jointly develop the European market. SZXY expects the total investment amount to not exceed 2 billion yuan.
At present, in order to further improve the supply capacity, SZXY disclosed in another equipment purchase announcement announced on the evening of the 26th that the company will purchase 8 biaxially stretched microporous battery separator production line equipment for the design, manufacturing, and manufacturing from Bruckner Machinery Co., Ltd. Supply and other services, the contract value is 105 million euros.
Northvolt's lithium-ion battery products are mainly used in the fields of automobiles, grid storage, industrial machinery and portable tools. Customers include first-tier brands such as Volkswagen, BMW, Siemens, and Vestas. For example, Northvolt recently signed a 10-year battery supply contract with Volkswagen, with a total order amount of more than 14 billion U.S. dollars. Last year, it also signed a 2 billion euro battery supply contract with BMW. The company's main financing parties include Goldman Sachs, European Investment Bank (EIB), Volkswagen Group and BMW. Currently, Northvolt is establishing the production of charged cells, systems and solutions for lithium-ion batteries, including a research, development and testing production facility in Vasteras, Sweden, and a super factory in Skelleftea, Sweden.
As the main supplier of blade battery separators, SZXY has maintained a good cooperation with BYD. It is estimated that the company's annual shipments in 2020 will be about 700 million square meters. In the early stage, the company and LG had deep cooperation in the field of dry-process diaphragms. On this basis, the current wet-process diaphragms used for power lithium batteries have passed LG’s production line certification and are expected to start mass shipments in the second half of the year. Driven by high-quality downstream customer resources and supporting production capacity, the company is expected to maintain rapid sales growth in the next few years.