By Björn Jeffery, SvD Tech Brief. Published in Svenska Dagbladet on 18 February 2025.
Following SvD’s report that Scania is buying a factory from Northvolt, the next question immediately arises: who — or what — might buy the rest?
It was painted as a corporate empire in the green transition — before the first factory had even opened.
Northvolt rapidly launched operations in Sweden, Germany, Canada, and Poland. Joint ventures, so-called “joint ventures,” could be found in both Norway and Portugal. It looked ambitious and large-scale. The momentum behind Northvolt was enormous — and why not strike while the iron was hot?
Then came the crisis and the restructuring. The large corporate group with tentacles in different parts of the world may now instead become a liability. What type of buyer wants to deal with all these operations simultaneously? Especially when so few of them are functioning at their intended capacity.
Scania is now acquiring a factory in Poland, according to SvD, for a fraction of the roughly 1.6 billion kronor invested there. That solution — applied on a broad front — is looking increasingly like a realistic path forward. It appears that no white knight is coming to lift Northvolt out of its restructuring in one piece.
In other words: a large Northvolt could end up becoming many small ones.
Finding major shareholders willing to step in and take on greater responsibility has been a challenge for Northvolt throughout the crisis. Before the restructuring, Volkswagen was the single largest shareholder with around 22 percent of the shares. But the German automotive giant had its own problems to work through before a rescue of Northvolt could receive sufficient focus.
In December, Volkswagen agreed with German trade unions not to close the factories it had previously announced it would, but 35,000 jobs will still disappear by 2030 — a saving of 168 billion kronor. In such circumstances, prioritising further money to save Northvolt was not possible.
Being a part-owner of something is also not the same as wanting to run the entire operation. For Volkswagen to be a good customer and place purchase orders as a form of guarantee is one thing. Being a permanent industrial owner of a half-finished production facility making battery cells and systems is quite another.
Northvolt may now be broken apart by individual industrial players, financial consortia, or suppliers and industry peers who see an opportunity to turn the operations around.
The three tracks — which can proceed in parallel — look like this:
The first is industrial players, exactly like Scania. They are often already parties to the process, have been following Northvolt for a long time, and know what they need and what they don’t. If they can secure part of their supply chain cheaply, it could be an attractive option. Another example following the same track is Volvo Cars, which in January bought out Northvolt from the joint venture Novo Energy in Gothenburg. And like Scania, it would not be inconceivable for truck manufacturer AB Volvo to be interested.
Track two is financial consortia. They tend to emerge opportunistically when deals are to be made. Private equity firms are certainly doing the sums on what price individual parts of Northvolt would need to be at to make a good investment. An educated guess is that Vargas — another major Northvolt shareholder — could become a player here. EQT — with its newly arrived CEO — is another potential option.
The third track would be if a direct competitor to Northvolt bought a factory, or alternatively one of their many suppliers. Among the competitors one finds names such as BYD and CATL. And the most important supplier is Wuxi Lead. What all three have in common is that they are Chinese.
For that solution to be possible, there is a further complicating factor. Not only do willing buyers need to be found — they must also be approved by the government agency ISP, the Inspektionen för strategiska produkter (the authority for strategic products). They have previously blocked Chinese ownership of similar projects in Sweden.
Last autumn I posed the question of who would want to save Northvolt from its crisis. The conclusion at that point was that it was likely cheaper to let the company go into restructuring than to put money in at that moment. Now we are exactly there.
The Scania deal suggests that there could be a solution in which the company is broken up into smaller pieces. A handful of battery factories, spread across the world, could then live on under new owners. But it would also mean something else: the definitive end of the corporate empire Northvolt, as we know it today.
Update: American company Lyten, which announced the purchase of Northvolt’s assets in August, was subsequently reported by SvD to be experiencing difficulties securing the financing for its acquisition — with the deal’s completion repeatedly pushed back from October to December to January, leaving the situation unresolved.
