Toyota Motor Corporation and Panasonic Corporation announced on Tuesday they reached an agreement to establish a joint venture to deal with development, production, distribution, and order receipt of automotive prismatic lithium-ion batteries, solid-state batteries, and next-generation batteries. The agreement is subject to legal approval and is expected to be completed by the end of 2020.
The joint venture participation ratio will be 51% for Toyota and 49% for Panasonic and the total number of employees set to join the operations will be 3,500. Toyota is planned to take the responsibility for managing personnel related to battery cells. On the other hand, Panasonic will deal will the equipment and other assets' transfer to the areas of development in the plants in Japan and China.
"Together with Panasonic, we want to hone our competitiveness in batteries, which represent one of the core technologies of electrified vehicles. By contributing to the popularization of Toyota's and other automakers' electrified vehicles, we want to help find solutions to issues such as global warming, environment-related challenges, and energy-related challenges," Shigeki Terashi, Toyota executive vice president, commented.
