(Bloomberg) —
Panasonic Holdings Corp.’s newest battery plant in the US is on track to reach full production by later this year, a senior executive said, easing concern about the Japanese electronics maker’s commitment to supplying Tesla Inc. and other electric vehicle makers.
“We’re going to be full production this year,” Megan Myungwon Lee, the company’s head of North American operations, said in a Bloomberg TV interview on Monday.
Her comments come after Japan’s Nikkei reported last week that Panasonic planned to delay bringing production at the Kansas facility up to full capacity.
“When we commit to something, we’re fully committed and we want to make sure we support all the customers,” she said. “We’re not feeling the slowdown yet and we’re very bullish.”
Tesla, Panasonic’s biggest battery cell customer in the US, reported a 13% drop in US sales for the second quarter compared with a year ago as demand for its EVs weakened.
The new factory will ship battery cells to Tesla as well as several other EV makers, including Lucid Group Inc. and Hexagon Purus ASA.
“We’re definitely working with Tesla but we want to work with other established OEMs as well as startups,” Lee said, adding that Panasonic’s partnership with Tesla is “very strong.”
Lee spoke at a ceremony commemorating the grand opening of Panasonic’s second battery factory in the US, located in De Soto, Kansas, near Kansas City. While the facility is online and battery cells are being made, construction is still ongoing. At completion, the plant will have about 32 gigawatt-hours of annual capacity — enough to supply cells for 500,000 EVs.
The company also operates a battery manufacturing factory in Nevada, which has supplied Tesla since 2017. The current annual capacity of that facility is about 41 GWh and Panasonic said in a statement that the Kansas plant will bring its total US-based output capacity to around 73 GWh “once fully operational.”
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