The last section of the power battery industry chain is battery recycling and material recovery, and it has been attracting much attention lately. To capture the huge potential business opportunities in this section, GEM’s wholly-owned subsidiary “Wuhan Power Battery Regeneration Technology Co. Ltd.” is raising capital from strategic investors in order to build facilities for processing decommissioned batteries. GEM is a major Chinese supplier for battery materials.
According to the reporting by local Chinese news outlets, Wuhan Power Battery Regeneration Technology recently held a ceremony for the signings of capital injection agreements with affiliated investment platforms, government-owned investment platforms, and social capital investment platforms. The signing ceremony took place on June 28 in an industrial park operated by GEM in Wuhan, China’s Hubei Province. Around 10-plus individual investment entities participated in the event, which raised hundreds of millions of yuan in capital.
Wuhan Power Battery Regeneration Technology currently possesses five power battery recycling hubs that are respectively located in Wuhan, Wuxi, Shenzhen, Tianjin, and Jingmen. Since 2015, the company has been pioneering the concept of building a “green value chain” for new energy solutions. For batteries, this green value chain encompasses recycling, recovery or reconstitution of raw materials, recovery or reconstitution of battery packs, reuse of decommissioned batteries, and cascade utilization. The company particularly wants to develop, produce, and sell “green” cobalt in the global market.
As of now, Wuhan Power Battery Regeneration Technology has established partnerships with around 550 companies. They include battery manufacturers and well-known automotive companies. The company projects that by 2026, its power battery recycling capacity will surpass 300,000 tons, and its capacity for recovering battery metals like cobalt and nickel will reach 30,000-50,000 tons. Furthermore, the company expects that its battery-related products for cascade utilization will be widely adopted in the future. Drawing from these and other sources of revenue, the company’s overall revenue performance is projected to reach around the level of 10 billion yuan by 2026 as well.
GEM stated that six years ago, when the global market for new energy solutions was still in the early phase of development, it proposed the idea of forming a green value chain that would encompass the entire lifecycle of a power battery. The development of effective methods for recycling and reusing decommissioned power batteries would solve the problems of environmental wastes and value losses.
GEM has invested nearly 1 billion in a non-destructive method for dissembling power batteries, a data-driven technology for sorting recycled battery materials, and commercially viable processes for manufacturing battery-related products for cascade utilization.
Xu Kai-hua, chairman of GEM, said that this latest round of fundraising and establishment of mixed funds will help accelerate the expansion of both production capacity and market share. Through its subsidiary, GEM will be able to rapidly gain a significant presence in the global market for power battery recycling. Also, with the newly raised capital, GEM aims to build one of the world’s largest bases for recycling power batteries.
This article is an English translation of a Chinese article from TrendForce. The information presented here is available on public domain. Some Chinese names are transcribed into English using Hanyu Pinyin.