In the hope of creating a European counterpart to the Chinese battery manufacturers, the state pension fund ATP has invested 2.3 billion DKK in the Swedish company Northvolt.
Over the past six months, however, one bad piece of news about Northvolt has succeeded another, and now ATP's CEO, Martin Præstegaard, admits to DR that the investment is almost worthless.
- The value of the company is not very far from zero today. This means that most of the investment is gone, says Martin Præstegaard to DR.
Northvolt, which also has several large car manufacturers among its owners, has invested a lot of money in building factories in many countries, but it has had difficulty delivering the ordered batteries.
Has filed for bankruptcy protection
A larger round of layoffs was supposed to give more room in the budgets, but Northvolt had to file for bankruptcy protection in the US in November as a result of its cash reserves running out. The purpose of the bankruptcy protection is to have peace of mind to raise new money and reconstruct the company.
The question is whether ATP has the courage to throw more money at the Swedish company, but this has not been decided yet.
- It depends entirely on whether we can create a case where we believe, with overwhelming probability, that there is a good correlation between the return we can get and the risk we run, says Martin Præstegaard to DR.
ATP is an abbreviation for Arbejdsmarkedets Tillægspension. It is a statutory and mandatory scheme that all employees and employers pay into. The 5.7 million ATP members had assets of 725 billion kroner at the end of the third quarter.
/ritzau/
Text, graphics, images, sound, and other content on this website are protected under copyright law. DK Medier reserves all rights to the content, including the right to exploit the content for the purpose of text and data mining, cf. Section 11b of the Copyright Act and Article 4 of the DSM Directive.
Customers with IP agreements/major customer agreements may only share Danish Offshore Industry articles internally for the purpose of handling specific cases. Sharing in connection with specific cases refers to journaling, archiving, or similar uses.
Customers with a personal subscription/login may not share Danish Offshore Industry articles with individuals who do not themselves have a personal subscription to Danish Offshore Industry.
Any deviation from the above requires written consent from DK Medier.
