Britishvolt: UK battery startup collapses into administration | Hacker News Reader

Britishvolt: UK battery startup collapses into administration

bbc.co.uk

29 pointsedward17 comments

For non-UK folks: "administration" is similar to bankruptcy in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administration_(law)

Is it more like Chapter 11?

No. It's for corporate bodies.

When a company goes into administration, the company is dead, and the business is taken over by 'administrators' who run the business and sell it on or wind it up in an orderly fashion.

The company is then closed down and any creditors of the company paid out of the remaining proceeds - after the administrators have taken their fee.

Think of them as corporate undertakers.

I think the closest US equivalent in this case is chapter 7 bankruptcy.

If I've got it right chapter 11 is more a reorganzation and restructuring, while chapter 7 is disposing of the assets to pay off the creditors.

This is the latter and UK administration process is usually a sell off of the assets, occasionally a company is sold as a going concern, but mostly it can't be and gets sold as parts.

Reminds me of Chanje, the Chinese EV manufacturer that went bust. I bought one of their beluga-enormous white vans from Ryder for a song and it’s wonderful. Chanje scaled all the way up to million unit beluga-enormous EV van production on Chinese government incentives and then immediately went bankrupt when the incentives went away.

Something very odd about this setup. Lots of marketing and PR - not a lot of construction or engineering.

I'm sure the full story will emerge in time.

Looks like a bunch of grifters paying themselves big piles of money and delivering very little.

Edit: And there it is ... shocker

Britishvolt was founded by Lars Carlstrom, a Swedish automotive executive, and Orral Nadjari, a financier with connections in the Middle East. The former quit two years ago after revelations that he was a convicted tax fraudster. The latter quit this summer amid speculation that he was not up to the job of leading the business into commercialisation.

You can tell straight away it's a grift from the fact they went thru the trouble of creating a computer graphic of how their factory would look like. I mean, who cares what the factory looks like?

You have to spend $2.4bn on something, might as well be fancy graphics, because it obviously wasnt a battery factory.

https://archive.is/cR213 - a Times piece from November. They tried to find a buyer and failed but I wouldn't be surprised if some of those interested pick up the pieces from Administration at a haircut of what they would have had to pay.

"The company is understood to be down to its last £5 million. With a monthly wage bill of £2.5 million for the 300 executives and R&D engineers on its books, at an average salary of £100,000 a year, that is unlikely to get the business through Christmas"

I wonder if they had adopted a leaner approach of starting with a smaller factory/factories and scaling up they could have avoided this. Multi £B deals that require a cold-start seem destined for failure.

I'd imagine going smaller would make their stuff even more uncompetitive price-wise

What R&D and technical capabilities did this company have? It will be interesting to see if anything gets sold off in administration.

In the media, I saw lots of focus about the factory, a potential building, but nothing about the supply chain or component design.

This felt like a project where many of the partners suspected it was vapourware, but also didn’t want to be seen not getting involved.

seems this will negatively impact British car makers like Aston Martin and Lotus who had partnerships with Britishvolt:

https://www.pistonheads.com/news/ph-britishcars/lotus-partne...

https://www.pistonheads.com/news/ph-britishcars/aston-partne...

Reading the rather thin press on the relationship between Lotus and Britishvolt, it seems all Lotus signed was a “memorandum of understanding”.

Strange how so many of these smart and skilled business owners fail to appropriately pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Isn’t that what they always tell “the poors” to do?

What a strange response to this story.

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