Battery cell maker Morrow has filed for bankruptcy. The collapse of another promising cell manufacturer exposes how Europe talks about industrial sovereignty but refuses to guarantee the conditions for it.<\/p>\n
Green mobility group Transport & Environment takes notice and warns that the continent could lose 34 companies the size of Northvolt if political action remains what it is.<\/p>\n
It ended, as these things often do, with a press release nobody wanted to write. Morrow Batteries, Norway’s flagship battery manufacturer, together with Northvolt, proved that Europe could build a credible alternative to Chinese cell dominance \u2013 and announced it was filing for bankruptcy.<\/p>\n
The board had failed, after months of increasingly desperate negotiations, to secure the additional funding for survival.<\/p>\n
The worrying conclusion of Morrow’s collapse is that it is the third major Scandinavian battery company to go under in short succession. First, there was Northvolt’s implosion (though it seeks to resurrect after the acquisition by American Lyft), and then followed the quiet retreat of Freyr Battery.<\/p>\n
The latter abandoned its gigafactory ambitions in favor of American solar projects. The death toll in the sector keeps rising. Across Europe and North America, more than 14 Western battery manufacturers have failed since the beginning of last year.<\/p>\n
What makes Morrow’s end particularly painful is how credible the company was. It had real, promising technology, like LFP cells with 30% better performance (compared to the average), along with next-generation chemistry that eliminated cobalt and offered a genuinely non-Chinese supply chain.<\/p>\n
There were customers, too, like Nordic Batteries, the Ukrainian state-owned company Eldrift, and, just weeks before the end, its first defense contract with a major German manufacturer.<\/p>\n
It also featured heavyweight investors, including names like ABB, Siemens Financial Services, and the Norwegian state climate fund Nysn\u00f8. Collectively, they had poured well over 280 million euros into the company.<\/p>\n
The reasons Morrow itself identified for its failure are a familiar litany: Chinese oversupply crushing prices, rising capital costs, the complexity of industrialization, and an investment market that had stopped believing. They are the same forces that have killed their peers. These are structural problems, not accidental.<\/p>\n
In a recent study, published just after Morrow’s collapse, Transport & Environment puts precise numbers on the industrial cost of Europe’s drift. The report, “High Stakes: How Much EV Investment Is At Risk Across Europe?”, models the impact on battery manufacturing capacity under three scenarios: the current EU CO\u2082 law, the Commission’s proposed softening of targets, and the car industry’s own demands.<\/p>\n
These latter push for a five-year average instead of a fixed standard for 2030, and for weakening the 2035 zero-emissions deadline to 80%.<\/p>\n
The findings? If the car lobby gets its way, European electric car production in 2030 could halve to 3.7 million units, compared with projections. Battery manufacturing capacity would shrink by more than two-thirds. The equivalent, T&E calculates, of losing 34 factories the size of Northvolt, and up to 47,000 jobs. The market would not be there.<\/p>\n
“From China to Chile, electric vehicles are now the growth engine of the global auto industry,” said Julia Poliscanova, T&E’s senior director for vehicles and e-mobility supply chains. “If Europe weakens its car climate targets, China will pull even further ahead.”<\/p>\n
The study also modeled what happens to cathode production, which is the most expensive component of a battery cell. Under current law, local cathode manufacturing could cover more than two-thirds of European demand by 2030.<\/p>\n
In the car industry, only five cathode projects survive, covering barely 10% of the need. Dependence on Chinese imports would not shrink; it would grow.<\/p>\n
The fragile business case of battery manufacturers clearly requires predictable demand to reach the scale needed to compete. CO2 standards set that demand. Those standards are being rewritten right now.<\/p>\n
Morrow had the customers, the technology, and a good batch of early investors. What it lacked was a stable regulatory landscape that gave new investors reason to believe the market for its products would grow sufficiently by the time it reached commercial scale.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, CATL’s share of global battery capacity has risen by more than 9% each year, reaching a dominant 40.7%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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Battery cell maker Morrow has filed for bankruptcy. The collapse of another promising cell manufacturer exposes how Europe talks about industrial sovereignty but refuses to guarantee the conditions for it. Green mobility group Transport & Environment takes notice and warns that the continent could lose 34 companies the size of Northvolt if political action remains what it is. It ended, as these things often do, with a press release nobody wanted to write. Morrow Batteries, Norway’s flagship battery manufacturer, together with Northvolt, proved that Europe could build a credible alternative to Chinese cell dominance \u2013 and announced it was filing…<\/p>\n","category_list_v2":"Batteries<\/a>, China<\/a>, Energy<\/a>, Europe<\/a>, Industry<\/a>, Market<\/a>, Top Stories Today<\/a>","author_info_v2":{"name":"Piet Andries","url":"https:\/\/newmobility.news\/en\/author\/piet-andriesgmail-com\/"},"comments_num_v2":"0 comments","yoast_head":"\n