The electric battery industry is a presidential task

The global competition for the electric car batteries industry is increasing at a frenzied pace, and with it the flow of news that the media publishes every day about that industry, the raw materials involved in it, and the fierce competition in this field between China, Japan and Korea, each other on one side, Europe on the other side, and America on one side The third is the inter-state alliances that companies resort to to maximize their positions.

Almost daily, the media presents plans to pump money from states and companies into research, establishing new facilities, attracting competencies, registering patents, and tricks to avoid international trade prohibitions in order to dominate that industry .. The essence of the conflict is the one who precedes those in the three special challenges. By batteries, we mean the battery capacity, safety, and lifetime, all of which are related to the parts, cost and selling price to the public..

The media also tracks the impact of all this on the charger makers and on the market of mines and rare metals such as lithium, nickel and chromium, which enter the battery industry and other sensitive industries, and China and Japan have accumulated the strongest reserves in this field, but everyone has been alerting for some time to the danger of this.

The significance of the race was that Tesla set aside an International Battery Day on September 22, and Corona did not stop the violence of competition even though it slowed car sales in general, and the race heated up. The world returned to increasing restrictions on emissions, opening more room for environmentally friendly cars..

What is new is that Bloomberg Economic News reported, in a report a few days ago, that French President Emmanuel Macron’s strategy to unify the strength of his country’s companies in order to build batteries for future cars will not go as planned..

The agency said that the more than 120-year-old rivalry between Peugeot and Renault appears to be too fierce to be overcome, even for a € 5 billion ($ 6 billion) project backed by the powerful shareholder, the French government, in which Renault refused to participate. Therefore, an alliance was built from Peugeot, the oil giant Total and another company, to manufacture superior batteries, and Renault indicated after pressure that it might join the alliance if they guaranteed it to be on equal footing..

The danger of this industry, then, has reached the point where it has a presidential strategy that is pursued by the head of a large state like France himself. Governments allocate financial support to it in the billions, and the state openly manages to form alliances.

Macron had set out that batteries would be one of the most powerful tools to reshape the auto industry in Europe for decades, and that raising European production and operating it to counter Asian hegemony and meet the needs of the booming electric car market is an issue that cannot be delayed. Observers considered that Macron is seeking to make Airbus batteries. An instance of an Airbus aircraft.

It is known that an electric car battery can make up 40% of a car’s value, and that Europe will need at least eight to 10 battery factories to support its huge car market..

The global electric car batteries market reached $ 15 billion in 2016, but it doubled to $ 38.8 billion last year, and is expected to reach 93.9 billion in 2026. What lessons can our government, our makers, our researchers, our scientific institutes, and our financial institutions draw from all of this?