On September 27, Ford and South Korean battery company SKI announced that they would invest 11.4 billion U.S. dollars to build a battery plant and an electric vehicle assembly plant. Production is expected to start in 2025.

Among them, Ford invested 7 billion U.S. dollars and SKI invested 4.4 billion U.S. dollars. It is worth mentioning that this is the largest investment in the field of electric vehicles in Ford's history and the largest single investment in the US electric vehicle industry.

In May of this year, Ford and SKI established a battery joint venture BlueOvalSK, each holding 50% of the shares, and plans to invest US$5.3 billion (approximately RMB 34.2 billion) to establish two battery plants in the United States, with a combined annual production capacity of 60GWh. The total battery investment determined by both parties this time has increased by more than 4 trillion won over the previous time.

Specifically, the electric vehicle assembly plant will be independently built by Ford, and the two battery plants will be in charge of BlueOvalSK. Among them, the production base in Tennessee has an annual production capacity of 43GWh; the factory in Kentucky has an annual production capacity of 86GWh, with a total annual production capacity of 129GWh, which is jointly undertaken by BlueOvalSK and SKI. This also marked the birth of the largest battery factory in the history of the United States.

At present, SKI is investing US$2.6 billion to build its battery plant in Georgia, USA. The first plant has an annual output of 9.8 GWh, and the second plant has a planned production capacity of 11.7 GWh. The total production capacity exceeds 20 GWh. It is expected to start production in 2022-2023.

Up to now, including the two battery factories mentioned above in cooperation with Ford, SKI has 4 battery factories in China, 3 in Hungary, and 4 in the United States, totaling 11 large battery factories.

SKI said that its current battery order backlog is 1TWh, and it claims to have received more than 130 trillion won (approximately US$115 billion) of battery orders, totaling more than 1,000GWh, which can power approximately 14 million electric vehicles. However, SKI currently only has a capacity of about 40GWh, which means that its battery capacity is seriously insufficient.

Based on this, SKI is planning to expand from 40GWh per year to 200GWh in 2025 and more than 500GWh in 2030.

Whether it is capacity planning or investment layout, SKI's ambitions are evident, but the pressure and challenges it faces cannot be underestimated.

On the one hand, SKI's battery installed capacity is far from its capacity planning. Statistics from SNE Research show that from January to August this year, SKI ranked fifth in the global power battery installed capacity, with an installed capacity of 8.8GWh, an increase of 140.9% year-on-year, and a market share of 5.4%. Moreover, its power battery business is still at a huge loss.

On the other hand, competition among global head power battery companies is still very fierce, because these giants are willing to spend money to expand production.

Lithium-ion battery (LIB) has become the main energy storage solution in modern social life. Among them, lithium iron phosphate battery is a perfect replacement for lead-acid batteries, and it is the first choice for grid-connected peak shaving, off-grid energy storage, photovoltaic energy storage, UPS, data center, and other industries.