Japanese companies compete for China's lithium power battery market

When Japanese friends come to the house to visit, they often talk about the future of China's auto industry, especially the great development of electric vehicles in China in recent years.

“Do Chinese people like to buy ‘Tesla’?” Japanese friends often ask. So I took them downstairs and stood on the street of Wudaokou in Beijing. "Tesla" is basically a passing time.

Japanese friends were amazed that Beijing’s “Tesla” must have more than Tokyo! Of course, I will also tell them that the future growth of China's electric vehicle market lies not only in the “Tesla” produced in the United States but also in the many domestic brands that are flourishing.

The scale and growth potential of China's electric vehicle market is also seen by related Japanese companies. A key component in electric vehicles is the lithium power battery, which is the strength of Japanese companies. lithium power battery technology has developed in Japan earlier. Japanese companies have a number of patents in lithium power battery electrolytes and metal materials such as positive and negative electrodes. They have extensive experience in observing the purity of lithium batteries and the recovery of lithium batteries. This made them smell huge business opportunities in the Chinese market.

For example, lithium batteries require extremely high material purity. If metal chips are mixed, there is a possibility that the battery will ignite or explode. Once a foreign matter is discovered, it is necessary to stop production immediately. The production scale of automobile batteries is huge. The suspension of production means that enterprises face economic losses of several million yuan or even tens of millions of yuan. Therefore, electric vehicle companies need to carry out rigorous testing with a high-precision electron microscope to prevent this from happening.

Hitachi High-Tech Co., Ltd., which is well-known for producing leading electron microscopes, immediately opened a “Hitachi High-Tech Science Park” in Shanghai in March this year. It is mainly equipped with an electron microscope and equipped with various related analytical instruments. The intention of targeting the Chinese market in the future is very clear.

With the popularity of electric vehicles, there will be a large number of waste lithium batteries that need to be recycled, and there are huge business opportunities.

Japan's Mitsubishi Materials Co., Ltd. has been known for producing copper and lead in the past and has begun to shift its focus to the research and development of lithium power battery recycling. Another Japanese company, Fujifilm, which is famous for producing cameras, also has the technology of battery recycling and is actively looking for opportunities to cooperate in China.

Japan’s Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. announced in February 2018 that it plans to invest 60 billion yuan in China to directly produce electric vehicles.

Japanese companies are well aware that the world's largest electric vehicle market must be in China in the future, and lithium-ion battery production centers for automobiles are also here.

Zheng Yihua, the head of the Advanced Analysis Equipment Division of Hitachi High-Tech Co., Ltd. China Business Group, said: "We have seen that the number of papers published in China exceeds that of Japan, second only to the United States, ranking second in the world. This shows that China is already in many research fields. The world's leading level. So our focus is also changing - original China is just a market that provides products and solutions to customers. In the future, China will become the research and development center of cutting-edge products and lead the technological change."

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.