Tesla Inc is to forgo 1.14 billion euros (US$1.3 billion) of state aid for a factory that it is building in Germany because it has first decided to try to produce a new type of battery cell at scale in Texas, a person familiar with the matter said.
The US automaker has been working on so-called “4680” battery cells at a site near its auto plant in Fremont, California.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk last year said that after the firm proved it could make them on a pilot assembly line in Texas, it would manufacture them at scale at the factory that it has been constructing outside Berlin.
This made Tesla eligible to receive public funds from Germany as part of the EU’s Important Project of Common European Interest initiative, which backs first industrial deployments of battery projects in member states.
As Tesla has shifted gears and is further along producing 4680 cells at its factory under construction in Austin, Texas, it is no longer eligible for the money, the person said on condition of anonymity.
Tesla informed German authorities that it would not use the support package, German Ministry of Economics and Technology spokeswoman Beate Baron said earlier on Friday, without specifying a reason for the decision.
“It has always been Tesla’s view that all subsidies should be eliminated, but that must include the massive subsidies for oil & gas,” Musk wrote on Twitter after the ministry’s announcement. “For some reason, governments don’t want to do that...”
Musk, who also runs rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX), has bristled for years at detractors faulting him for taking advantage of government support. Examples of this include the US loan that helped Tesla get the Model S sedan into production, which the company paid back early.
After his initial Twitter post, Musk revisited a three-and-a-half-year-old exchange with another user who criticized Tesla and SpaceX’s use of subsidies.
“Combined Tesla+SpaceX market cap is now over US$1.2T [trillion],” wrote Musk, who then took issue again with a figure mentioned in a May 2018 Twitter thread.
Tesla shares on Friday fell 3.1 percent in New York trading.
Tesla has almost completed construction of an electric vehicle factory in the town of Gruenheide, southeast of the German capital, and also plans to manufacture battery cells at the site.
While Musk wants to start assembling Tesla Model Ys in Gruenheide before the end of the year, local authorities still have not granted final approval for the project.
The German ministry has estimated that Tesla is investing about 5 billion euros in Gruenheide.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
MORTGAGE WORRIES: About 34% of respondents to a survey said they would approach multiple lenders to pay for a home, while 29.2% said they would ask family for help New housing projects in Taiwan’s six special municipalities, as well as Hsinchu city and county, are projected to total NT$710.65 billion (US$23.61 billion) in the upcoming fall sales season, a record 30 percent decrease from a year earlier, as tighter mortgage rules prompt developers to pull back, property listing platform 591.com (591新建案) said yesterday. The number of projects has also fallen to 312, a more than 20 percent decrease year-on-year, underscoring weakening sentiment and momentum amid lingering policy and financing headwinds. New Taipei City and Taoyuan bucked the downturn in project value, while Taipei, Hsinchu city and county, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung
RSS