- Toyota and Panasonic will establish a joint venture (pending approval from the competition-law authorities in the countries and regions concerned) by the end of 2020.
- The ratio of equity participation in the joint venture will be 51 percent for Toyota and 49 percent for Panasonic.
- The scope of the joint venture's business operations will cover research, development, production engineering, manufacturing, procurement, order receipt, and management related to automotive prismatic lithium-ion batteries, solid-state batteries, and next-generation batteries.
- Products produced by the joint venture will be sold to various automakers through, in principle, Panasonic.
Toyota and Panasonic are confident that the contracts concluded today will further strengthen and accelerate their actions toward achieving competitive batteries.
The joint venture will integrate management and other resources from both companies, fusing strengths of both Toyota and Panasonic. Toyota is to contribute: 1) know-how and market data related to electrified vehicles, 2) advanced technologies related to solid-state batteries and more, and 3) Toyota-style manufacturing capabilities (monozukuri); while Panasonic, demonstrating its strengths as a battery manufacturer, is to contribute: 1) technologies related to high-capacity and high-output batteries that are high-quality and extremely safe, 2) mass-production technologies, and 3) a customer base both in Japan and overseas. In this way, the joint venture aims to become the leader in battery-development and battery-manufacturing capabilities.
Specifically, for the joint venture to become the leader in battery-development capability, Toyota and Panasonic intend to coordinate with each other from the vehicle planning and conception stage, and promote the acceleration of high-capacity and high-output battery development. For the joint venture to become the leader in battery-manufacturing capability, Toyota and Panasonic intend to share with each other their production-engineering resources and monozukuri know-how...
We have high expectations for the new company, including―as we aim to deliver ever-better electrified vehicles to even more customers―its role in fulfilling our plans for the popularization of electrified vehicles* (including achieving Toyota annual global sales of more than 5.5 million units of electrified vehicles), which we announced at the end of 2017."