Future for EV (electric vehicles) and EV battery in India
Well I think you know over the next five years up until 2025 we’re probably going to be expecting somewhere in the region of fourteen to sixteen percent penetration goal for EV’s across the global market. India has some very ambitious targets and I believe that number is seven million vehicles by approximately 2030.
In India market, the supply chain is still very underdeveloped so obviously we have a very large population here and we have a very large automotive population. Essentially there are four steps to get into a battery so you obviously have to start with your raw materials in the ground whether you use your lithium your cobalt your nickel you then have to produce the chemical from it so in the case of lithium it’ll be lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide beyond that we then have to produce materials which are essentially cathode materials added materials separators and electrolyte and these are the four main components that go into constructing a battery cell and then you then have cell production and then last but not least you have pack assembly before it goes into the EV.
India market at the moment has a major challenge that I see is that the supply chain is very very limited so we have some PAC assembly and I believe that there are companies looking at domestic cell production but the rest of the supply chain is basically does not exist as of today well just to give you an example China last year saw 1.25 million electric vehicles and the vast majority of them 70–80 % are pure battery electric vehicles its target is to reach a stock of about 5 million vehicles by next year so rough estimates for vehicle sales this year are somewhere in a region of about 1.6 to 1.8 million vehicles so that will probably get them to about 5 million vehicles in the whole country as of today China already has 1 million charge points across the whole country so your ratio of vehicles to charge points is about 5 to 1 and you know China has had to invest a lot in the grid infrastructure to upgrade their city grid so that it can handle the the new charging facilities that get built the challenge I think for India but it’s also an opportunity because I believe that if the right investment is made there will be some significant growth opportunities there is that you can’t just throw your EV population because you need your charging infrastructure and so I think the number of charge points in India today are probably very limited and so you need to get to a reasonable ratio and also a reasonable distribution of your EV population even if it is just in the major cities in you know tier 1 cities in India to having the right number of charge facilities because even if the OEMs make all the investment in building the EV’s and building the battery supply chain and having the actual EV vehicles electric vehicles come onto the market if there’s not enough charging facilities then the consumer is not going to be buying those vehicles because they’re always going to be after queueing for charging so at the same time is looking at the whole EVM battery supply chain I believe it’s also very important for the Indian government and also Indian corporations to be looking at the infrastructure and the related services around it.
