Amara Raja Batteries Ltd., India’s second-biggest traditional battery maker by value, will build a lithium-ion assembly plant as it seeks to grab a slice of the market for electric vehicle power packs that is set to grow to $300 billion by 2030.
The battery maker is in the process of building a 100 megawatt-hour assembly plant in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh and the company is working closely with the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, Chief Executive Officer S. Vijayanand said in an interview in New Delhi.
“There’s incubation work going on because we are at a beginning stage both from the market-demand and product-development perspective,” Vijayanand said. “We are very focused on building solutions for the early stage of electrification of vehicles and work with the OEM programs at the same time.”
In India, where about 3 million fossil fuel-powered passenger vehicles sell annually, automakers including Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd., Tata Motors Ltd. and Ashok Leyland Ltd. are making EVs.
Overseas companies such as Hyundai Motor Co. and Suzuki Motor Corp. are considering entering the new segment as the government plans to have green vehicles comprise about a third of its fleet by 2030.
For the rest of this article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-06/amara-raja-s-lithium-ion-plant-eyes-300-billion-india-ev-market