IG Metall had dreamed about for the German manufacturers, it is the Chinese who have done it. Germany will soon have its own factory of automotive batteries. The manufacturer CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology) announced, Monday, 9 July, his intention to build their first site of production of battery cells excluding China, in the Land of Thuringia, in eastern Germany. This commitment was announced in the course of consultations, German-chinese, which were held Monday and Tuesday, in Berlin.
According to the plans revealed Monday, CATL is expected to invest 240 million euros in Thuringia by 2022. The site should be developed in several stages : it is first and foremost a distribution center, which will add a research laboratory, then the production will be developed. Six hundred to a thousand direct jobs should be created through this factory.
For its investment, CATL takes advantage of generous local grants of the share of a region’s fragile economically. The region of Thuringia, gave the chinese the 7.5 million euros of funds economic support to convince him to settle on its soil. But the manufacturer BMW has also played a decisive role : it participates itself to the construction cost and provided to CATL an order of 4 billion euros in the next few years, 1.5 billion of which must come from Thuringia.
Decline of the internal combustion engine
IG Metall welcomed, on Monday, the investment decision of CATL. We are still far away however the wish, expressed long since by the union, see builders and contractors team up to control the production of cells, the basic element of the vehicle batteries. “If we abandon the battery cells because they are delivered sooner or later we will disappear “, “alarmed”, at the beginning of July, Jürgen Wechsler, director of the division in bavarian the big union industry.
IG Metall fears the disappearance…
