Northvolt discontinues production at its main plant in Sweden
Bankruptcy trustee Mikael Kubu has now announced that although the search for a buyer for the production plant, known as Northvolt Ett, is progressing, it is currently not foreseeable that a buyer could actually take over production in the near future. For this reason, production, which has continued with the support of a single existing customer – Scania – is now to be gradually reduced and discontinued by June 30, 2025.
According to the Swedish TV station SVT, only 900 people are said to have been working there recently – although at the end of March it was still said that 1,200 of the 3,000 people in Skellefteå would be able to keep their jobs. However, the fact that they were only working for the customer Scania could not continue in the long term. And so a Scania press spokesperson told SVT: “Unfortunately, this is no longer financially viable for Scania”. Ultimately, this means that the battery cells from the underutilized factory have become too expensive in the course of the insolvency proceedings.
The Scania spokesperson did not want to directly confirm rumors that Scania would purchase its battery cells from the Chinese battery giant CATL in the future, but said: “Today Northvolt and the bankruptcy trustee are announcing that they are discontinuing production. Then we shouldn’t be standing here talking about other suppliers.” However, it would be easy to see that there is no longer any battery production of this caliber in Europe, the Scania spokesperson continued. Scania’s parent company Volkswagen, which is also a major shareholder in Northvolt, is currently building its own cell factories in Salzgitter (Germany), Sagunto (Spain) and outside Europe in St. Thomas (Canada) under the name PowerCo.
The announced end of Northvolt’s battery production follows a series of bad news: the company has been struggling with quality problems since the start of production in Skellefteå at the end of 2022. Production rejects were still far too high in the summer of 2024, which not only caused enormous costs, but also kept the production volume of cells ready for delivery far below plan. This ultimately led to Northvolt shareholder BMW canceling an order worth billions.
A short time later, Northvolt had to divest its first subsidiaries due to empty accounts. However, the situation continued to deteriorate: in November 2024, Northvolt filed for Chapter 11 restructuring and CEO Peter Carlsson resigned. But that didn’t help much either, and in March the parent company Northvolt AB and several subsidiaries in Sweden filed for insolvency. This was followed at the end of March by the news that around 2,800 of the 4,500 employees in Sweden would lose their jobs – including at the main plant in Skellefteå.
It is still unclear what will happen to the Northvolt factory under construction in Heide in Schleswig-Holstein. According to German TV station NDR, construction work is currently underway on the site, but it is more about infrastructure measures or civil engineering work for the laying of power lines. Formally, the German Northvolt company is independent of Northvolt in Sweden and, according to a Northvolt Germany spokesperson, the processes in Sweden should have no impact on the planned site in Heide. However, it must be assumed that the project would only be viable with a new investor. As 600 million euros of taxpayers’ money has already been invested in the Northvolt project in Heide, the issue is also politically explosive. The German Federal Audit Office is now investigating the German aid for Northvolt – and a committee of inquiry may be convened in the state parliament of Schleswig-Holstein.
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