Chinese automotive manufacturer BYD plans to list its batteries business within the next four years to fund expansion plans, founder and chairman Wang Chuanfu has said.
Wang (pictured) told Bloomberg the company, which is backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway group, is eyeing an initial public offering for its battery storage business by the end of 2022.
Wang said the company is in the process of spinning off its vehicle-battery operations into a separate firm before listing. He said the listing would take place by the end of 2022— but that the Shenzhen-based company had yet to decide where the shares would be traded.
Wang said China’s land transport could become fully electrified by 2030. He said he recently proposed to the government that it electrifies all buses by 2020, taxis by 2021, logistics vehicles by 2025 and private cars by 2030. If that happened, he estimated the country needed to boost battery-manufacturing capacity by about ten-fold to 1,000 gigawatt-hours a year.
Last July, BYD said it was teaming up with state-owned rival car maker Changan Automobile for a joint venture to build a battery gigafactory in China.
The announcement came hot on the heels of opening a plant in Qinghai Province “equivalent in size to around 140 football pitches”— that would itself have a 24GWh production capacity when it ramps up to full capacity in 2019.
