MOSCOW (MRC) -- Japanese chemical firm Sanyo Chemical Industries will provide additional financing to its subsidiary APB for the development of bipolar all-polymer lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, said Chemweek.
Sanyo will provide ?700mn ($6.8mn) of additional funds to start-up battery producer APB. Japanese casting and equipment producer Sintokogio and major private-sector bank Mitsubishi UFJ Financial will also invest a total of ?400mn in APB, although the exact breakdown of their contribution is unclear. The batteries will be manufactured at APB's Takefu factory in Fukui prefecture, with the production line to be set up by Sintokogio.
This latest round of funding takes the total that APB has secured for the project to ?10bn. This includes investments by Japanese firms in June and March. Sanyo aims to produce sample batteries by April next year and begin operations at the Takefu plant in the autumn of 2021.
The all-polymer batteries have higher energy density and storage compared with conventional batteries and are expected to enable EVs to achieve longer driving ranges. The batteries, which are made of resins, also have higher resilience to shock, while production costs are lower because of their simple bipolar structure.
Sanyo cancelled a business integration agreement with catalyst producer Nippon Shokubai in October. But Sanyo's development of bipolar all-polymer Li-ion batteries is unaffected by the decision.
As per MRC, Nippon Shokubai and Sanyo Chemical have postponed their plan to merge via a share transfer, which would have formed an integrated holding company named Synfomix Co. The deal was announced in May 2019. The companies had planned to establish the holding company on 1 October 2020, located in Kyoto, Japan, subject to regulatory approval.
We remind that Russia's output of chemical products rose in November 2020 by 9.5% year on year. At the same time, production of basic chemicals increased in the first eleven months of 2020 by 6.6% year on year, according to Rosstat's data. According to the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation, polymers in primary form accounted for the greatest increase in the January-November 2020 output. November production of polymers in primary form rose to 896,000 tonnes from 852,000 tonnes in October. Overall output of polymers in primary form totalled 9,240,000 tonnes over the stated period, up by 17.1% year on year.
MRC