The Information published an investigative report, which reviewed in great detail how Northvolt, a European battery company, failed miserably: - Before filing for bankruptcy protection last week, Northvolt had raised a huge investment of $14 billion, but now only $30 million of cash is left in its account. A series of top investment institutions including Goldman Sachs, Volkswagen, and Siemens are facing the result of losing all their money, which may be the most severe investment failure in the technology industry; - It is not an exaggeration to say that Northvolt was born with a silver spoon in its mouth. In order to regain the dominance of the new energy battery industry from China, from the founding country Sweden to the entire European Union, and then to Canada in North America, all gave Northvolt the green light to grant special loans and land, and subsidies were issued to the point of being soft; - But Northvolt's entry into the battery industry was "impure" from the beginning. The advantage it positioned itself in was neither technology nor price, but a politically correct commitment - only using environmentally friendly energy such as hydropower and wind power for production - and European automakers, for reputation reasons, will tend to prefer this kind of supplier with its own "indulgence"; - The initial development was indeed as expected. Famous manufacturers such as Volkswagen, BMW, and Volvo all placed orders with Northvolt and paid sufficient advance payments. Volkswagen even paid $1.6 billion out of its own pocket to invest in the company, firmly embarking on this path of not being strangled; - Everything seemed to be going well. The only problem was that Northvolt found that it could not make batteries; - To be fair, Northvolt is not a scam. Its founding team came from Tesla's supply chain and knew a lot about batteries. However, there were only a few people in Europe who knew how to build a battery manufacturing plant from scratch; - Northvolt's confusing operation began with the site selection of the factory, out of the pursuit of clean hydropower energy. It opened a factory in Sweden in the small port town of Skellefteå in the Arctic Circle, but it was not dark in summer and not bright in winter, so the biological clocks of the workers who moved here were disrupted, and finally even the Swedes were unwilling to come to work; - In the end, only more than 100 outsourced workers from China and South Korea could be used. They lived in their own dormitories and were transported to the factory by bus every day to work. Because of the language barrier, there was basically no communication. Once the alarm sounded, the European workers did not hear it, and the Chinese workers had to open their phones and use Google Translate to tell them what happened; - The Chinese outsourced workers mainly came from a battery upstream equipment manufacturer in Wuxi. In order to rush the work, Northvolt denied the process of testing equipment in China and required that all of it be completed in the Swedish factory. As a result, the running-in was a disaster, because from the grassroots employees and engineers to the managers and the board of directors, none of them had production experience; - Former Northvolt employees interviewed believe that this is not a problem with the Chinese partners, but that Northvolt is too incompetent. "We have no technology, no knowledge, and everything needs to be taught by the Chinese. They gave us the machines and built the factories. Without them, we would not know anything." - As of December last year, Northvolt's battery production capacity had only reached 1/200 of its planned target. The purchase orders that were originally set in stone were cancelled one after another. Several banks that once strongly supported it also changed their faces. After the debt financing failed last month, the CEO resigned; - With the end of Biden's term, the policy of subsidizing the Western local battery industry is expected to be invalidated. At least in the lithium battery market segment, there is no second Northvolt in Europe and North America. 2/3 of the world's lithium batteries are produced in China, and the average price is 1/3 of that of Western lithium battery manufacturers; - Related recommendation: The podcast in which Zeng Yuqun, the founder of CATL, was a guest of the Norwegian Sovereign Fund, which is the program that contributed the famous sentence: "Why can't Europe make good batteries? First, their design is wrong; second, their process is wrong; and finally, their production is wrong."