Over Five Years
SK Nexilis has signed a large-scale mid- to long-term copper foil supply contract with Northvolt of Sweden, Europe’s largest secondary battery manufacturer.
The company announced on Feb. 19 that it will supply copper foil for secondary batteries produced at its Stalowa Wola plant in Poland to Northvolt for five years from 2024.
The contract volume represents about 80 percent of Northvolt’s copper foil demand during the period. It is worth up to 1.4 trillion won and can be used for 1.7 million electric vehicles. SK Nexilis will run a plant in Poland with an annual capacity of 50,000 tons from 2024. Northvolt is promoting the construction of a large-scale battery production plant with a total capacity of 150GWh. It has attracted investments of more than 1 trillion won from European automakers such as Volkswagen and Volvo.
Market research firm SNE Research predicted that the global copper foil market for secondary batteries will grow from 270,000 tons in 2021 to 750,000 tons in 2025, logging at an average annual rate of more than 40 percent.
In particular, copper foil with a width of 1 meter or wider, which can greatly increase the productivity of secondary batteries, is expected to be in short supply beginning from 2024. This forecast is fueling competition among copper foil producers. The world’s leading battery manufacturers are building processes that use wide copper foil, but wide cooper foil account for only 30 to 50 percent of most copper foil producers’ output. In the case of SK Nexilis, wide cooper foil accounts for more than 90 percent of its output.