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Comment by myspy | Hacker News Reader

So what is the learning here, why did it fail? From the timeline it looks like it spread out too much and didn‘t create a great product first.

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Comments from insiders in Swedish[1] and Dutch[2]. Some snippets:

... In the end, they are just in a situation that is almost impossible to save. You have a factory full of machines that are substandard in quality, reliability and documentation. A huge 100% in-house tech stack that largely consists of Go pieces on Lambdas writing to DynamoDB. ...

... A gigantic factory full of mediocre Chinese equipment, what can you do with that? They are not standard things, they are things custom made for Northvolt but unfortunately with incomplete specifications. ...

...The whole market is not doing well in Europe. We don't really have the raw materials here (Northvolt's came mostly from China), we don't have the knowledge (that's in Asia) and we don't have the machinery for production. ...

[1] https://old-reddit-com.translate.goog/r/sweden/comments/1g1x...

[2] https://tweakers-net.translate.goog/nieuws/228816/faillissem...

Pfft. Sure blame the Chinese equipment and not the corrupt and incompetent European management. The Chinese manage to produce batteries just fine.

Main equipment manufacture was Wuxi Lead, where naturally everyone speaks almost exclusively Chinese and all docs are in Chinese. Not a problem of course when most customers are also Chinese, much more so when they're European.

If you are spending billions, surely you can bring in some people that speak both Chinese and the local language. Heck, there are even real-time translation services now. No, the problem is not technical, it's that it was a scam from the get go.

The goal of a scam is to make the scammer richer. Who gets richer in this case? No one. So that’s not a scam. I’m disappointed seeing that kind of accusations stated without evidences on HN, a forum about entrepreneurship and tech, where we used to celebrate success as much as learn from failure.

The money from investors went somewhere, there are people that got richer...

Most of the money went into the pocket of extraordinary dedicated employees who were paid market salaries (actually often slightly below market), and suppliers as well.

He also mentioned they didn't specify certain details when ordering, leaving the Chinese to make choices, and that caused issues they had trouble with once delivered.

This might be a culture thing. At least next door here in Norway, a decent supplier will definitely ask when needed, offer suggestions and even resist if you try to order something stupid.

Having a supplier/disti work with you to get the best deal doesn't happen very often. Mostly due to the fact that they could leave money on the table. If you order something with the wrong configuration they can always sell you another thing with the right configuration...

There is also a possibility of cultural differences and who knows what the Chinese thought the Europeans wanted when they did not send complete specs for the equipment. In some countries it is not customary to challenge the client - but I do not know if it applies to China as well.

I've seen how they build stuff in China, and most likely Nothvolt thought it could do some things on their own without understanding what those things would entail. Maybe if they would have asked the supplier to come in and setup the factory and also run the first batches of finished batteries the situation would have been different.

Somehow I think now they're trying to find a scapegoat for the whole debacle and blame on the usual suspects.

To be fair, the referenced comment (in Dutch) blames management:

> Helaas is het probleem bij Northvolt echt gewoon te herleiden naar slecht management (ex-Tesla), en bijgevolg een slechte keuze van leverancier van productiemachines (Wuxi Lead).

> A huge 100% in-house tech stack that largely consists of Go pieces on Lambdas writing to DynamoDB

Oh, well, that explains everything! Great insight... /s

The tech stack was a weird quote. This is significant:

> In theory it's microservices, but the reality is that there are so many circular dependencies that it works like a monolith

But lambda/go/dynamodb does not force this situation.

True, but it doesn't mean you can code it to be in this situation.

If all your life you coded monoliths, you can code monoliths using Lambda functions too, there's nothing magic that will stop you from doing it.

You can’t outsource something for decades then think throwing money at something will be enough to pick it up yourself on a tight timeline.

Nor be surprised if your interests don’t align with a chineese actor you’re trying to replace.

Nothing to learn here, they were just scamming various governments.

That's why they promised to expand to so many places, each government subsidized them separately.

Expanding to multiple EU states is a requirement to satisfy the various governments if you are getting public EU funding. See Airbus for an example.

The difference is that Airbus didn't as much build new factories (and certainly not several at the same time) as it is a consortium (and later a unified company) of formerly independent European aerospace companies. E. g. their current German plants, Hamburg (commercial aircraft) and Donauwörth (helicopters) used to belong to MBB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt-B%C3%B6lkow-Bloh...) and then DASA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASA). That's a consolidation similar to what happened in the US, albeit maybe with more "state interference".

I read something once about the question of Airbus and Boeing subsidies. The short answer was “It’s complicated.”

Of course, that particular question seems to have been rendered irrelevant by Boeing’s quality crisis.

And also kinda required from an economies-of-scale point of view. The US is spoilt by havbing a massive, culturally-and-language homogenous country. Despite their wealth, If you want to hit those scales in Europe you need many countries on your customer list. And since each country (usually) has it's own language, laws, norms, sometimes currency, it gets way complicated, way fast.

I think i read that they could not deliver the quality and quantity expected for automobile production. Bad product, overextension and I won’t be surprised if some graft will show up once they start digging. Norway has another such venture where the executive suite pays themselves handily and delivered nothing.

Northvolt also counted on cheap materials from Russia, e.g. infamously environment unfriendly nickel from Norilsk, which clearly didn't pan out after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

I found a post supposedly written by a Chinese supplier of Northvolt. Not sure how true it is though so you will have to find some insiders to validate the story. You will need some software to translate the picture into English/other languages.

https://imgur.com/AyQYtFj

This is somewhat true, but I don’t think it is necessarily fair to them. Their strategy was to try to do everything themselves (except raw material mining). By having vertical integration across the battery space, they would be able to hopefully compete on price with the battery giants in China like CATL, while still working out of Europe, which is a lot more expensive in terms of labor costs, and regulation, and everything else. But they didn’t get that far and their biggest customers like BMW started abandoning them while waiting for deliveries to begin. This began the doom spiral. But it is possible that with more money and time this would’ve been the right strategy for the long term competitiveness of the company. Otherwise, if it’s going to be permanently uncompetitive what’s the point? Maybe this was indeed, some kind of scam for government subsidies. But I think it’s more about the difficulty of finding funding to do big things, and to do them properly.

Doing anything in the EU is hard, and since CABM is not even live yet it was unnecessarily extra-hard.

And then it seems they were completely incompetent. (Custom middling quality machines ordered from Asia, they then weren't able to scale up the process and/or quality.)

Of course, if it had worked it would have made a lot of money to a lot of people.

https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/carbon-border-adjustme...

It says in the article, they expanded too fast and i agree. Your other point also seems to hold.

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