“We are doing this work day and night so that we can come back with answers to all the questions, which will take us a few more weeks,” says North America CEO Paolo Cerruti.
Northvolt North America CEO Paolo Cerruti suggested the Swedish company may have been too ambitious and reiterated that it has no plans to ask for more money from governments for its lithium battery plant planned east of Montreal.
“Recent months and weeks have been difficult” and we are going through a “crucial period in the history of our company,” admitted the North American CEO of Northvolt.
Cerruti reiterated that Northvolt is in Quebec “to stay,” but it remains unknown how the restructuring of the Swedish company will affect the plans for the factory and its schedule.
“The work is still ongoing and we don’t have all the answers yet. We are doing this work day and night so that we can come back with answers to all the questions, which will take us a few more weeks.”
Speaking to journalists, Cerruti affirmed that Northvolt did not intend to ask for more money from Quebec and Ottawa.
“We have a timetable for financial support as part of what was announced in September last year and we have not planned to ask for more money and, as part of the recent refinancing of the company, we did not ask the government for money, neither federal nor provincial.”
He also indicated “that at no time had the company found itself in financial difficulty in Quebec,” before adding: “We are well capitalized, so we continue to work every day on the site, we continue to doing what we’ve always done, we continue to hire. So the confidence here is strong.”
After a 20-minute speech in front of representatives of the electric vehicle industry, Cerruti participated in a discussion with Karim Zaghib, professor of chemical and materials engineering at Concordia University and also the one of the organizers of the event.
Zaghib asked Cerruti if Northvolt “had been too ambitious” and if “the company had grown too quickly.”
“Inflationary pressure” and “the way the industry is perceived lately” would have contributed to liquidity problems, Cerruti initially responded.
“Also, I think we could have integrated some key skills earlier in the company,” but “that’s what the strategic review will determine,” he added.
“But it is an industry that is extremely, extremely young, in its development and in its industrialization. So the talent pool is not huge. We had to look for talent in Asia to set up our operations in Sweden,” he said.
He also suggested that the company may have dabbled in too many different businesses.
“For example, we announced that we would sell assets, so is it necessary to launch into these sectors?”
Cerruti did not refer directly to the cathode business, but recently the company sold its site in Borlänge, Sweden, where it was to build a plant for cathode materials, the positive terminal of a battery.
“Everything that we are experiencing or have experienced in Sweden over the last months and I would say over the last year, these are lessons, learnings, which we will bring here and which will be extremely valuable,” he said.