29.04.2022 Erfurt
It was a pleasure to visit CATL's factory in Erfurt together with Mr. Weidong WANG, Gesandter, Ms. Qiu Yuanling, Botschaftsrätin and Duan Wei, Hauptgeschäftsführer bei CHKD.
This is currently one of the biggest Chinese greenfield investment projects in Germany. Automated manufacturing has been widely applied there, and it amazing and worth mentioning that the plant uses plenty of hardware equipments as well as process management systems, which are designed, manufactured and imported from China.
In 2018, CATL signed an investment agreement with the government of Thuringia,, to build one of the largest electric vehicle battery plants in Europe in Erfurt, providing 2000 jobs. This is not only CATL's first battery factory in Germany, but also Germany's first battery factory, furthermore, this is the first overseas battery factory of China to be into operation.
Between 2018 and 2019, CATL has been intensively obtained orders from first-class OEMs, including BMW, Daimler, Peugeot Citroen, Volkswagen and Tesla, while this factory is also within the 300-km transport radius of Tesla in Brandenburg.
On April 6, 2022, CATL officially announced this plant in Thuringia, has been granted a license to produce 8GWh of battery cells (the planned capacity of the plant is 14GWh). At present, CATL is sprinting for its products to come off the production line by the end of 2022.
Appreciating a lot for this dynamic and excellent team of CATL in Erfurt.