Panasonic Holdings Corp. plans to roughly quadruple annual battery production capacity to 200 gigawatt-hours by March 2031, a sign that it anticipates greater demand for EVs.
The Osaka-based company, which supplies batteries to Tesla Inc., intends to tap subsidies provided by the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, as well as focus on cylindrical batteries and the North American market to expand, CEO Yuki Kusumi said Thursday.
Panasonic broke ground on a new $4 billion battery factory in De Soto, Kansas, in November as it seeks to ramp up production. Although Panasonic has supplied Tesla from its early days, the Japanese manufacturer has been slower to build scale compared with rivals LG Energy Solution Ltd. of South Korea and China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co.