Lyten is about to take over the German Northvolt subsidiary

The US company Lyten continues to work on the takeover of the German subsidiary of the bankrupt Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt. “The negotiations and work on the final purchase agreement are well advanced and are in the final phase,” said Marketing Director Keith Norman. The negotiating partners had originally aimed for a signing in the third quarter.

“Additional time will be needed for the final coordination of individual legal and commercial details that are still open,” said Norman. The respective formal approval processes of the parties involved followed and the contract was signed.

At the beginning of July it became known that, following a declaration of intent with the development bank KfW, Northvolt Drei Project GmbH and its shareholder LG Batterie GmbH, Lyten would assume the costs of maintaining and securing the assets, including personnel costs, at the German Northvolt subsidiary. In return, the state of Schleswig-Holstein and Lyten signed an exclusivity agreement.

American plans

In contrast to the parent company, the German subsidiary Northvolt Drei did not go bankrupt, but was kept alive by the federal and state governments. According to information from the German Press Agency, Lyten will pay around 60 million euros for the area near Heide. After Northvolt's insolvency, the 100-hectare site with building rights was valued by auditors at at least eleven million euros.

If the transaction is concluded, half of the purchase price should go to the federal government and half to the state. Northvolt received a convertible bond worth 600 million euros from KfW to build the factory. The federal and state governments each guaranteed half. After the bankruptcy, the federal and state governments were only able to secure 153 million euros. The financial damage for Schleswig-Holstein is around 200 million euros.

Lyten initially wants to build significantly smaller than Northvolt planned to build a battery factory with 3,000 jobs. In March, Lyten boss Dan Cook announced the first details of his plans after a visit to the state government in Kiel. According to his statements at the time, around 1,000 jobs would initially be created on the site.

However, the plan is not to be a business that depends exclusively on batteries for electric vehicles, but rather to produce batteries for a wide range of applications, including defense, stationary energy storage, mobility and electric vehicles.