Update: Added content and tweaked the headline.
An affiliate of Li Auto will invest RMB 400 million and an Nio- related fund will invest RMB 250 million.
Chinese power battery maker Sunwoda today announced plans to raise capital for its subsidiary Sunwoda Electric Vehicle Battery Co Ltd (Sunwoda EVB) with the participation of an Nio-related venture capital fund and a Li Auto affiliate.
A total of 19 companies plan to inject RMB 2.43 billion in capital to Sunwoda EVB to take a 19.5495 percent stake in the company after the capital increase is completed, the battery maker said in an announcement today.
The Shenzhen-listed company said its board meeting on February 23 had approved the plan, and those investors plan to sign a capital increase agreement.
Li Auto's affiliate Jiangsu CHJ Automobile Co Ltd, Sky Top LLC and their designees will each invest RMB 400 million, making them the two largest investors, each taking a 3.2 percent stake in the company.
Suzhou Weirui Venture Capital Partnership, in which William Li, the founder, chairman and CEO of Nio, holds an indirect stake, plans to invest RMB 250 million for an approximate 2 percent stake.
None of these three companies previously held any shares in Sunwoda EVB.
Sky Top is an entity associated with Xpeng, LatePost said, citing people close to the deal.
After the Sunwoda investment, Li Auto's power battery supplier remains just one, CATL, and if it changes supplier, this will be shown in a new product announcement, the report said, citing a person close to Li Auto.
Xpeng, which previously had CATL as its main supplier of power cells, has confirmed the use of 4C power cells from another local supplier, Sunwoda, in its midsize SUV G9, which was released last November, LatePost reported late last month.
C refers to the battery's charge multiplier, and 4C means that the battery could theoretically be fully charged in a quarter of an hour. Similarly, 3C means the battery can be fully charged in a third of an hour.
When Xpeng launched the G9 on November 19 last year, it said that the car could carry a power battery with a maximum capacity of 100 kWh and a power density of 2.2 kW/kg.
The Xpeng G9 is China's first production vehicle based on the 800V high-voltage SiC platform and can get a range of more than 200 kilometers on a five-minute charge, the company said at the time.
According to LatePost, Sunwoda will be the main supplier in one version of the G9, with a share of more than 50 percent.
Sunwoda started out making cell phone batteries and went public as an Apple supplier on the A-share in 2011.
In 2008, Sunwoda began manufacturing automotive power battery packages and battery management systems, and began full-scale production of battery cells in 2018.
The company has been a supplier for Xpeng's G3, which went on sale in 2018, in the battery assembly segment.
Sunwoda's market share in China in 2021 was 1.3 percent, ranking 10th, according to data released in January by the China Automotive Battery Innovation Alliance, with CATL ranking first with 52.1 percent share.
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