The Japanese company Nidec is in final negotiations with the local authorities regarding the construction of an electric vehicle engine factory and an accompanying research center in Serbia, which will be worth about 1.9 billion dollars, the Japanese business portal Nikei Asia announced.
So far, Nidec has invested resources in expanding production in China as the largest electric car market, but now it is also turning to Europe as the second largest electric vehicle market.
The new factory should reach a capacity of between 200,000 and 300,000 units by 2023, and in addition to Serbia, it is planning factories in Poland and France.
However, as this portal writes, the factory in Serbia will be the center of European production.
In September, representatives of this company were in Serbia and toured the industrial zone in Novi Sad.
A few days ago, the general director of Nidec, Shigenobu Nagamori, announced his ambitions to occupy 40% of the growing market by 2030, and he will allocate almost 10 billion dollars for that.
Their goal is to produce engines for two million electric vehicles in China and one million vehicles in Europe.
In the last five years, Nidec’s gross revenues have increased by 50 percent, thanks to increasingly strict regulations around the world that limit emissions from internal combustion engines, and Nagamori is sure that the future of all vehicles, including ships and planes, will be electrified.
Sales of electric vehicles and hybrids in Europe in the first half of this year increased by 62 percent and reached 399,000 units.
That is why almost all major car manufacturers are aggressively trying to develop the production of electric vehicles, including Volkswagen and Daimler, as well as Tesla, which is building its “gigafactory” in Germany.
This is followed by battery manufacturers, so LG Kem and Samsung have already built factories in Europe, as well as CATL, which is building a factory worth two billion dollars in Germany, while the Japanese group Toraj Industries is building a factory in Hungary to produce lithium battery separators.
Although we did not receive answers to questions from the Japanese Nidec or the Development Agency of Serbia until the end of the issue, this news is certainly good. How good it is depends on the level of technology that will be used here.
“An investment of two billion dollars does not come every day and that is certainly a good thing. The news is scanty, so it is difficult to say what the effects will be for our economy. If it is only the employment of manual workers, it will be good because of the employment and their salaries. But if our engineers are hired who will gain knowledge and experience, and if our companies supply the factory with components, that will be great and it will be different from most factories that work in Serbia,” Savic estimates.
The production of electric motors has no direct connection with batteries, but both go into electric cars, and in Serbia a deposit of jadarite was discovered, an ore from which lithium can be obtained from which batteries for electric vehicles are made, which could make Serbia a regional center of this promising industry.
Savic reminds that President Vucic spoke about the construction of a Chinese battery factory, but also that the site belongs to Rio Tinto, a Canadian company, and that it should be seen how that cooperation will be made.
“To my knowledge, Rio Tinto faces three challenges in extracting and processing lithium. The first is the ecology and protests of local communities. The second is the uncertainty of which technology will be dominant on the market of batteries for electric cars, and in the end, they get boron in production as a by-product that they do not know how to sell for now,” explains Savic.
Nidec is a company that gained a world name by making precise electric motors for starting hard drives, and otherwise several companies already operate in Serbia, which have the production of electric motors in their portfolio.
It is the German Brose, which is supposed to produce fan modules for cooling the engine in Pancevo, but that company also makes electric motors, then Johnson Electric, which makes small precision motors and drive subsystems, and Bosch, which started the production of electric wiper motors in Serbia.
As for the Japanese companies, last year the arrival was announced by Tojo, who should build a factory of car tires with a capacity of five million pieces in Indjija by 2022, in which he will invest 390 million euros, Danas reports.
