India’s Amara Raja has said supplying lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles represents a multi-billion-dollar “sunrise space” to expand business in the country, while keeping its focus on lead-acid.
The company said India’s government-backed push for 40% of all private vehicle sales to be EVs by 2030 “is a US$42 billion opportunity” for lithium battery sales within that period. In addition, 100% of all public transportation in major cities should be EV’s by 2030, according to the government’s National Institution for Transforming India (NITI).
“Based on this, the opportunity for cell manufacturing would (be worth) around $15 billion,” Amara Raja said in its latest financial report.
But the company warned that while India is “not only late to enter lithium-ion battery manufacturing, it would also face several challenges in the form of zero or low reserves for key minerals like lithium and cobalt and limited technical know-how for lithium batteries”.
According to NITI, India will need a minimum of 20 gigafactories collectively producing around 800GWh of batteries annually by 2030 to support all EV sales.
BEST Battery Briefing reported in 2018 that Amara Raja was set to build a 100MWh lithium-ion battery pack assembly plant in Andhra Pradesh, in India’s southeast.
Amara Raja’s vice-chairman Jayadev Galla (pictured) said last year the company was investing $120million to expand production lines of lead-acid batteries in India.
Meanwhile, Amara Raja said its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation for the first quarter of the financial year to the end of June 2019 was INR2.8 billion (US$40.5m)— an increase of more than 23% over the same period in the previous year.
