Northvolt wants to list its shares at Stockholm, over other venues. This would be one of the biggest flotations in Europe in recent years.
According to sources familiar with the situation, the Swedish battery manufacturer has invited investment firms to make formal pitches for the role they could play in the deal, which could be worth around $20bn. Rothschild & Co is advising on the process of the initial public offer.
The company that was founded by two former Tesla executives in 2017 to become Europe’s leading homegrown battery manufacturer, could be listed as early as next year. The people who spoke to the media said that its plans were preliminary and may change as long as market conditions remain volatile.
Northvolt Rothschild and Northvolt declined to comment.
They want to be prepared to move as soon as the market conditions are favorable. One person familiar with the proposed listing said, “They want everything ready to go.”
Andreas Pettersson Rohman told Sifted, a sister publication, that they had worked for over a year on putting in place all the processes and internal control measures. Then, it would be up to the markets to decide. Let’s wait and see what the market looks like in the next two years.
Northvolt has investors such as Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Volkswagen and Volkswagen. This year, it raised €1.2bn from investors such as the world’s biggest money manager BlackRock.
It also plans to announce more than $5bn of debt financing in the next few weeks, confirms a report from March. This will cement its status as Europe’s most successful start-up.
Northvolt’s investors, which include BMW, Siemens, and Blackstone need the funding to build or plan the four gigafactories, as well as a number of battery recycling plants and other plants throughout Europe and North America.
The factory will be built just outside Montreal in Canada and production is expected to begin by 2026. This investment of $5bn on the North American Market, along with an effort to gain better access to minerals essential for batteries, is part of a $5bn wager.
The European Union and North America are engaged in a subsidy war to lure local battery manufacturers to compete with the dominant Asian players. VW informed EU officials in this year that US subsides — which Canada, according to the companies, has promised to match — are worth between €9bn and €10bn for each factory.