Investor That Can See The Future

Chapter 167

Lithium-ion batteries have the property of exploding upon impact.

L6, there was a problem with the battery itself in the first place, but there were many other smartphone explosions.

Smartphones have small batteries, so even if they explode, the damage is also small. As a result, there have been no casualties. But electric cars are a different story. The size of the battery is also much larger, and if the car on the road explodes, it immediately leads to a major accident.

In fact, Nikola’s electric car had several accidents with batteries exploding, and the driver who could not escape died.

As such, the safety of the battery is the top priority.

The cathode material of the original ternary battery contains nickel, manganese, and cobalt. However, the battery that just exploded was made of a cathode material by mixing nickel, manganese, and a new material.

Depending on what ratio the cathode material is mixed and how the anode material and the separator are composed, the instability problem may be solved.

Professor Ho-min Kim and the researchers all look confident.

What else can you do with the development of a new material that can replace cobalt?

Currently, the maximum range of electric vehicles is about 500 km.

By installing more batteries, the cruising range can be increased as much as possible. However, this reduces the interior space of the vehicle due to the volume of the battery, increases the price, and makes the body heavy.

And the heavier body reduces fuel economy and reduces the cruising distance again. Stable and efficient control of the extended battery pack is also not an easy problem.

However, using this new material battery, the range can be increased to more than 1,000 km. Charging time will also be cut in half, which used to take more than 30 minutes.

“First, apply for a patent.”

In the case of SMEs, even if they develop good products or technologies, they are often taken away by large companies. To claim a right, you must first obtain a patent.

Well, even if you have a patent, it will be taken away if you don’t have the power The law, as always, is on the side of the powerful.

Even though my father’s company had a patent, the technology was lost to Eunsung car. In the process, the company went bankrupt and his father died.

But this time it’s different.

OTK Company already has enough money and influence. There will be no such thing as opening your eyes like that time.

* * *

OTK Research Institute has applied for patents in Korea and the United States.

All patents developed by the research institute belong to the research institute, and the research institute also has profits such as patent fees.

70% of the stake in the institute is owned by OTK Company, which invested the money, and the remaining 30% is owned by Professor Homin Kim, the head of the institute.

The reason I set up the Battery Lab is to make electric vehicles. However, batteries are an essential part of not only electric vehicles but also all wireless electronic devices.

Smartphones, laptops, drones, robots, medical devices, etc.

If it succeeds in commercializing it, it will completely dominate the secondary battery market instead of the existing NCM battery.

When the news broke, the industry was shocked.

If you could easily create a material that could replace cobalt in the first place, why would you spend a lot of money on cobalt?

Even batteries using this new material can double the capacity and quadruple the charging speed.

In some cases, it was vehemently criticized.

Of the numerous patents, only a few are actually commercialized. It will be the same this time.

But the market didn’t take it that way.

?-It is absurd to have invented a new material to replace cobalt.

-By the way, is it possible to secure enough safety to replace NCM batteries?

-lets think. What’s wrong with what Jinhoo Kang touched?

– You said that Brexit wouldn’t happen Ronald’s election as well. Karos also completed the autonomous driving technology by giving what AMZ and Eunsung had given up.

-Isn’t this really an electric car that can travel 1000 kilometers on a single charge?

– Then what happens to the hydrogen car?

When the development of a new material battery became known even though there was no guarantee that it would be commercialized, the price of cobalt, which had skyrocketed without knowing it, plummeted by more than 15 percent in one day. Shares of cobalt processors also fell one after another.

Cobalt miners and processors will die, but the battery industry is in a breath-taking atmosphere.

Those who have been hit the hardest are speculators who have been hoarding their bets on the rise of cobalt. Some hedge funds lost tens of millions of dollars in one day.

The response from the industry was generally poor. In the meantime, hedge funds have been at their peak, and not only cobalt but also raw material prices have risen more than necessary, so the losses were not so great.

On the other hand, Seoseong SB’s stock price soared as it was highlighted that it has a 30 percent stake in TS Company, a joint venture with OTK Company.

* * *

Calls flooded in from all directions.

CL Chemicals, SSK Innovation, BID, BTL, Technics, and other leading Korean and global companies have made various proposals.

Instead of talking to them, I first called Seoseong SB.

Afraid to contact him, Chairman Im Jin-yong rushed to the OTK Research Center with Seoseong SB researchers. Professor Ho-min Kim and researchers were astonished when a chaebol they had only seen on TV suddenly appeared in front of them.

Chairman Im Jin-yong greeted him.

“Nice to meet you. This is Im Jin-yong.”

“nice to meet you. This is Homin Kim.”

After the greeting, Chairman Im Jin-yong looked at the battery made of new material and was astonished. Even more surprising than replacing cobalt is that it doubles the density and quadruples the filling rate in the same volume.

In the meantime, unlike the tremendous speed of development of electronic devices, the development of batteries has been slow due to physical limitations. However, new technologies have been developed to overcome these limitations.

I had a separate meeting with Chairman Im Jin-yong.

“I’m glad you look healthy. I was very worried because I couldn’t wake up for a long time.

“Thanks to you, I had a good rest.”

“Anyway, it was an earthquake all of a sudden. San Francisco is not safe either.”

“It’s probably because it spans the Pacific Rim orogeny.”

Chairman Im Jin-yong said while drinking coffee.

“When I was living in Japan, earthquakes were a daily occurrence. Once or twice a month I crawl under my desk.”

Just thinking about it made me smile.

After the daily conversation, Chairman Im Jin-yong said.

“Finding an alternative to cobalt has been a long-cherished dream of the battery industry. But I never imagined it would be resolved so quickly.”

I nodded.

“I am, too.”

I expected it to take several years, but it was much faster than that.

New technologies are not created suddenly one day, but are built on the basis of existing technologies.

We were just faster than others, but wouldn’t other companies develop similar new materials someday?

What matters is time. How far you can get ahead of others determines the fate of a company.

I am glad that Professor Ho-Min Kim was hired earlier. Otherwise, this technology would have gone somewhere other than us.

“New material batteries will change a lot of things.”

“Before that, we need to address the stability issues.”

“If there is any need, we will do our best to help.”

Seosung SB has world-class technology in the battery field. Perhaps you can get a lot of help in solving the problems before commercialization.

But there is no free lunch in the world.

“Are there any conditions?”

Chairman Im Jin-yong smiled.

“There are no other conditions. However, I would like you to allow Seoseong SB to produce batteries with new materials first, except for TS Company.”

TS Company was established to produce electric vehicle batteries.

OTK Company owns 70% of TS Company’s shares, and Seoseong SB holds the remaining 30%. He is also a major shareholder with an 11 percent stake in Seoseong SB.

There is no reason for me not to do that.

I nodded.

“I will discuss it with the head of the institute.”

* * *

The aftermath of autonomous driving technology that Karos unveiled in Silicon Valley continued.

GM also announced its technology announcement, and Nikola said that it would raise Autopilot to Level 4 from next year. Mercedes-Benz and BMW have announced that they will launch self-driving cars as soon as German laws are amended.

On the other hand, companies that entered the market as latecomers temporarily stopped test driving and looked at the atmosphere.

In this situation, when it became known that the research institute under OTK Company had developed a new battery material, the market was engulfed in another shock.(Read more @ wuxiax.com)

From the perspective of automakers, this is a double hit.

The place that shocked me the most was Nikola again this time.

Nikola CEO Allen has thought that lowering the price of batteries is the key to popularizing electric vehicles.

The method he chose was to reduce the price through mass production and efficiency of the production process. So he teamed up with Technics to build a large-scale battery plant called the Giga Plant in Nevada.

Upon completion, it will produce enough EV batteries to meet its own demand. The excess production was planned to be supplied to other automakers.

However, the OTK Research Institute developed a new material. If commercialization is successful, of course, TS Company and Seoseong SB will produce batteries with new materials, and the competitiveness of Giga Plant, which produces NCM batteries, will lag behind.

Nikola stock plummeted again, evaporating billions of dollars in market cap.

This time, Allen Everhart did not stand still.

To a reporter asking a related question, he said, ‘New materials that are more expensive than cobalt are just garbage. Given the money and time, I will find a way to increase the efficiency of the existing NCM battery instead of making such a stupid thing.”

It wasn’t as much as Nikola, but it was the same with Eunsung Cha that made the situation difficult. After failing to usurp the management rights of Seoseong SB, Eunsung Motors has been all-in on hydrogen car development.

Eunsung Motor tried to build a hydrogen car camp by attracting global automakers until the patent was released.

Even for this, success in Korea was desperately needed.

Eunseong Motors was planning to make Korea a forward base for hydrogen cars. As most of PAS’s sales are generated from transactions with Eunsung Motors, Sihyung Park did not stand still.

After the savings bank crisis, it was difficult to increase the budget for eco-friendly vehicles in a desperate situation to prevent power leakage.

Park Si-hyung somehow found a way.

First, politicians belonging to the Korean Family Party put pressure on the local government, which is the head of the local government, and ordered that a hydrogen car charging facility be built.

He also significantly eased related regulations under the pretext of distributing eco-friendly cars.

And he changed the policy to pay half of the subsidy for electric vehicles to hydrogen cars. Eunsung Motors was the only company that could launch a hydrogen car in Korea, so the subsidy was nothing more than Eunsung Motors’ share.

However, while the plan was being pursued with the goal of launching a hydrogen car in the second half of the year, the news of a patent application by the OTK Research Center suddenly came.

Unlike electric vehicles that use secondary batteries, hydrogen cars use fuel cells that directly generate electricity.

Therefore, if Eunsung Motors cannot overcome the physical limitations of batteries, eventually the market leadership will be transferred from electric vehicles to hydrogen cars.

Other automakers also knew that fact, so they did not give up on the hydrogen car development plan, even though they knew that the commercialization would be low.

However, when the new material battery developed by Professor Homin Kim is commercialized, the problems of mileage and charging time, which are the fundamental problems of electric vehicles, will be resolved.

This meant that the advantages of hydrogen cars over electric vehicles would soon disappear.

Chairman Han Min-koo muttered in despair.

“Is it Kang Jin-hoo again? … .”