Koenigsegg and NEVS announced a new technical partnership recently that also includes some swapping of cash for stock in various entities. Both companies are Swedish although NEVS (the National Electric Vehicle Sweden Company) is now owned by a Chinese parent. You may remember an article Motoring Weekly published recently about Koenigsegg’s camless engine and we have written several articles about NEVS, notably as part of the history of SAAB and their involvement with the Turkish National car that didn’t seem to go anywhere. Interestingly, when General Motors was restructuring back in 2008, Koenigsegg was the first company to sniff around the SAAB marque using Chinese money. When that fell through, Koenigsegg’s competitor, Spyker, then had a go before NEVS stepped in.
As part of this new tie up, NEVS will take a 20% stake in Koenigsegg’s parent company for a price of €150M and they will also take a 65% stake in a new joint venture for a further €150M. Koenigsegg will provide technological input, designs and other intellectual property to this new entity. As Koenigsegg build ultra-luxury hyper-cars and need to get access to electrification and they need some extra manufacturing facilities, this is good for them because they can use some of the space at the old SAAB factory in Trollhättan.
Recently NEVS was acquired by Evergrande Health Industry, a very large Chinese entity that is owned by Evergrande who are mostly focused on real estate! They have bought 51% of NEVS and the CEO, Kai Johan Jiang remains in place having bought the SAAB assets from General Motors in a fire sale. Evergrande have also recently bought a controlling interest in the Shanghai CENAT Energy Company that specialises in battery packs.
For NEVS, they get access to Koenigsegg’s skills in new materials and the camless engine which could be combined with their tech for certain vehicles – in fact there are now rumours that there will be an “entry-level” Koenigsegg! Clearly the two companies need to sell their own respective products and it sounds like Koenigsegg wants more production space to speed up the assembling of their vehicles and NEVS also have a facility in China that could be used to do final builds of hyper-cars for the Asia market. That facility has been ramping up the assembly of the 9-3 EV, so perhaps production will also rise with some extra input from Koenigsegg.
More information will follow I’m sure!
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