Toyota first purchased batteries from Chinese suppliers BYD

June 11, 2019

According to the Financial Times, Toyota, Japan's largest automaker, has broken the tradition and reached a partnership with two Chinese battery manufacturers. Toyota's goal is to achieve large-scale rebalancing on a global scale, turning to electric vehicles.

Toyota will source batteries from the  BYD, the first time the company has purchased key components from Chinese manufacturers.
Established in the Ningde era for only 8 years, it has established a cooperative relationship with global automakers such as Honda. Since its sales in Panasonic in 2017, it has been the world's largest battery supplier.
Toyota will also expand its domestic battery purchase agreements beyond Panasonic's long-term cooperation, including GS Yuasa and Toshiba. These decisions underscore that Toyota is expected to have huge demand for batteries.
In the past year, in order to meet stricter emission regulations (especially in Europe and China), global automakers are racing to adjust the lineup of zero-emission models, re-powering electric vehicles (including gasoline hybrids, plug-in hybrids and pure The sales expectations of electric vehicles have fundamentally changed.
The overall demand for electric vehicles in the global market is much higher than Toyota's expectations, which may make the Japanese company's existing strategy of self-produced batteries in trouble, and Panasonic does not seem to have sufficient strength.
Toyota’s previous goal is that by 2030, half of its global car sales will be electric vehicles, about 5.5 million, including traditional hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs). Pure electric vehicles (EV) and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCEV). But now Toyota has changed its expectations, and it will advance its 50% sales target to 2025. Toyota said that the “popularity rate” of electric vehicles is much higher than expected when it set its initial target in 2017.
Toyota's newly upgraded electrification strategy includes the mass production of battery electric vehicles in China starting in 2020. It is widely expected that China will become the world's largest electric vehicle market. Toyota also plans to introduce at least 10 battery-powered pure electric vehicles worldwide by the beginning of 2020.
In FY 2018, Toyota's global car sales were 9.5 million units, of which about 17% were electric vehicles, and the vast majority were gasoline-electric hybrids. Toyota's 2018 global sales, plug-in hybrid vehicles only accounted for 46,000.
Despite an ambitious forecast for electric car sales, Toyota executive vice president Shigeki Terashi warned of profitability and said that it will take a long time for electric cars to be profitable. Determining a business model that leads to higher profit margins will be a challenge.
He believes that the idea of ​​this business model is not just to manufacture and sell cars, but to work with partners to make profits from the entire life cycle of the product, including sales, leasing, sharing, peripheral services, used car sales, batteries. Business such as utilization and recycling.

 

From china battery net