Moll, the family-owned lead battery maker based in Germany, with notable up market customers including Porsche, has announced a strategic partnership with Metair – the Johannesburg-listed automotive supplier which already owns European battery maker Rombat in Romania and Mutlu in Turkey.
Moll also has a partnership with Chaowei in China which commenced in 2014 and the German firm has already supplied 4 million batteries to that nation.
The reason for the partnership, according Rainer Wagner, VP of international business development at Moll is “insatiable demand” for the company’s EFB technology.
Talking to BBB at the ILA lead meeting in Berlin, Wagner said: “If you had asked the experts of the lead battery community a couple of years ago whether it would be possible to get with a flooded battery design such an excellent cycling performance in parallel with very high cold cranking current, 95% if not more would have said: ‘No, impossible’. In spite of this, Moll started intensive R&D work showing clearly that substantial improvements of lead batteries are still possible.”
“Our successful development of advanced EFB is resulting in increased demand for Micro-Hybrid batteries, particularly in Europe and steadily more car manufacturers are replacing AGM by Moll EFB for this application,” Wagner said.
The partnership with Metair means production can be switched to Rombat and Mutlu plants to keep up with demand – and that’s even with a doubling of the size of the Moll Plant in Bad Staffelstein.