An Australian battery company has made a preliminary bid for Britishvolt, the start-up that collapsed last week.
David Collard, founder of Recharge Industries and a former partner at PwC in New York, arrived in Britain yesterday and said he was due to meet administrators at EY.
Collard, 38, also said he was planning to meet officials from both countries at the high commission of Australia in London today, Australia Day, and to tour Britishvolt’s site on the Northumberland coast near Blyth.
Recharge, which is being assisted by Lord Botham, the UK’s trade envoy to Australia, plans to make a formal offer in about a week.
Collard said it had backing from Jefferies, the investment bank, and a number of Australian and US firms, which included looking at a potential Spac listing in New York. Recharge would also want to secure support from the government “to understand the financial position” before potentially tapping the capital markets, but Collard said: “Raising capital is not a problem.”
EY has fielded expressions of interest from more than a dozen potential bidders since it was appointed last week.
Britishvolt had ambitions to create a gigafactory to produce hundreds of thousands of battery packs annually and to create 3,000 jobs, which would have made it one of the biggest employers in northeast England.
The venture was billed as an important part of the automotive sector’s transition to electric cars, the government’s levelling-up agenda and the wider transition to net zero.
Britishvolt appointed administrators after struggling to raise funds and its collapse has triggered political criticism of the government.
The office of Ian Lavery, Labour MP for Wansbeck, in the northeast, welcomed the “potential bidders willing to build a gigafactory on this site and create thousands of much-needed jobs for the region” but said he was “wary of the need for a robust vetting process to ensure that any future owners of the site have the resources and are capable of getting started as soon as possible”.
Britishvolt had received backing from the government but Grant Shapps, the business secretary, last year refused to allow it to draw on £30 million of bridging finance from the taxpayer-backed Automotive Transformation Fund because key milestones were yet to be met, such as raising sufficient private investment.
When EY was appointed, Britishvolt had 232 employees, but 206 have been made redundant. Under Recharge’s plans, the remaining 26 staff would be retained and work remotely on the company’s Australian battery venture in Geelong or support Britishvolt, Collard said.
Recharge was founded in 2021 by Scale Facilitation, Collard’s New York-based investment firm, but its underlying IP was developed more than 12 years ago in the US.
Collard said: “Recharge plans to deploy a battery-making technology using a patented lithium-ion chemistry that does not utilise cobalt or nickel. We plan to start building a gigafactory in Geelong this year, with first production on track in 2024.”
Recharge plans to issue an exclusive licence for its technology to be used in production at Blyth.
Collard believes the recent free trade agreement between Britain and Australia would assist a potential Anglo-Australian deal for Britishvolt and that it was preferable to a takeover by a company from China which “dominates global supply”.