There are only five European countries, including Germany, where the majority of announced production capacity is not from European companies. While this makes Germany the country with the most announced production capacity from non-European companies (279 GWh), it also remains the country with the largest announced production capacity from European companies (151 GWh).

In addition to Germany, Sweden (with the extensive announcements of Northvolt) and Italy (ACC, FAAM and Italvolt) each have over 100 GWh announced by European companies. Non-European cell manufacturers can be found besides Germany mainly in Hungary - with announcements of the Chinese companies CATL and EVE, as well as already existing cell productions of the Koreans Samsung SDI and SK On.

Non-Europeans dominate in the short and medium term

These are the announcements until 2030. At least in the medium term, however, the non-European cell manufacturers will still dominate the local cell production. Only after 2025 will the European cell manufacturers catch up with the non-European manufacturers.

Whether and how these announcements will ultimately be translated into reality depends, of course, on many factors - will there be delays or will some projects fail completely? The fact that Asian companies can build large factories in a short time has already been demonstrated on many occasions - CALB in China, for example, is said to have recently built a 50 GWh factory in just over a year. Many Asian companies are already established cell manufacturers, so their plans could be given a higher probability of realization than those of European start-ups, especially when it comes to quickly ramping up production.

For example, the British start-up Britishvolt ran into extensive financing difficulties, so that their expansion plans may be questioned. However, the Chinese players also have to adapt to the European framework conditions, which does not rule out delays in the development of production capacities. The Chinese manufacturer Farasis Energy found out that plans can also fail completely when the city of Bitterfeld-Wolfen (Saxony-Anhalt) canceled the construction of a factory, at least for the time being.

These possible developments underline the importance of observing the build-up of production capacities that is now taking place. For achieving an economic sovereignty in the battery value chain, a successful implementation of the European plans is certainly desirable. In this way, existing market structures can be broken open to give the opportunity for establishing upstream value creation such as component and material production or machine and plant construction in the large emerging battery industry in Europe.