12-03-2025
KEY FACTS: What we know so far about the Northvolt bankruptcy
What has happened?
Northvolt's board voted on Tuesday to file for bankruptcy in Sweden, with the company then on Wednesday filing bankrupcty applications to Swedish courts for five companies: Northvolt AB, Northvolt Ett AB, Northvolt Labs AB, Northvolt Revolt AB and Northvolt Systems AB.
The immediate trigger was the deadline to pay 291 million kronor to the Swedish Tax Agency, but the bigger problem was the company's failure to secure a further round of financing or find a buyer for the ailing business.
What happens now?
The court today accepted Northvolt's application and appointed the company's nominee, Mikael Kubu, chief executive of the Swedish insolvency and reconstruction specialist Ackordscentralen, to act as trustee over the business.
What will happen to people who are working at Northvolt?
Tom Johnstone, the company's interim chairman, said at the press conference that there were close to 5,000 people still employed at Northvolt and that he was "hopeful that operations would continue to a certain degree".
"Let's focus on working with the trustee to secure continued production, to secure jobs, we hope, for a number of people there," he said.
If Kubu manages to find a buyer for one or more of the businesses, some of these may be able to stay working at the factory.
"We are looking at what the conditions are like for maintaining production," Kubu said in an interview with TT on Wednesday.
On paper, he said, all of the employees will lose their jobs even if the factory continues to operate as the business will need to be passed to a new owner.
"The redundancies usually take a bit of time, but all staff are normally made redundant in a bankruptcy. The operation can of course live on, but then it will be as a new company," he said.
If no buyer can be found or if Kubu decides that there needs to be a staff reduction to make one or more of the units viable, then workers will lose their employment.
When companies go bankrupt in Sweden, employees are protected by a so-called 'wage guarantee', which determines how much of any unpaid salaries, holiday pay and notice pay you are entitled to receive from the bankrupt company.
In 2025, the maximum wage guarantee is 235,200 kronor. The exact amount employees receive is decided by the bankruptcy trustee.
How realistic is it that the factory can be rescued?
Johnstone said at the press conference that the company had been making progress in overcoming its production problems, doubling cell output from serial production lines and improving its production yield by 50 percent since September.
"We have had problems in the manufacturing. We've been very open with that," he said. "The trajectory is very good within the factory just now. It is moving absolutely in the right direction. It's not solved, but the trajectory is good just now."
If this is true, a buyer, perhaps Chinese, perhaps European, may want to take over the factory.
Some, however, question whether a remote location such as Skellefteå was ever the right place for such a plant.
What does this mean for the founders or the company?
Peter Carlsson, the former Tesla executive who co-founded the company in 2015, is in a relatively secure position, having sold a total of 198.1 million worth of his shares in the company between 2019 and 2021, according to research by Dagens Industri.
When he was asked about this after the press conference on the bankruptcy, he became combative, denouncing the journalist for asking "an unbelievably stupid question".
What does this bankruptcy mean for Swedish industry?
This is being described in Swedish media as the "largest Swedish bankruptcy in modern times," with Swedish pension funds losing billions of kronor in savings as a result.
The company's total debt is estimated to be around 60 billion kronor.
Sweden's four AP funds, which manage Swedish pension savings, have invested 5.8 billion kronor in the company, or around 0.3 percent of the funds' total capital.
That money was assumed to have been lost when the company went into reconstruction, and the new bankruptcy filing means it is gone for good.
The company's owners stand to lose the most money, however, as they are estimated to have put around 90 billion kronor of capital into the company.
The bankruptcy is also a heavy blow for Scania, the Swedish truck maker owned by Volkwagen, which had invested heavily in Northvolt and had hoped to rely on it as its sole supplier of batteries.
As well as initially investing hundreds of millions of kronor in the company, Scania lent Northvolt 1.1 billion kronor last year as the troubled company battled to stay afloat.
More importantly, the bankruptcy will raise questions over other projects in the so-called 'green transition', such as the green steel start-up Stegra, which, like Northvolt, had Vargas Holding as its intitial investor.
What does the bankrupcty mean for Skellefteå?
Lorents Burman, the mayor of Skellefteå, the city which had invested heavily in helping Northvolt get established, described the bankruptcy as "a nightmare" for the local municipality.
The municipality has over the past ten years pushed for rapid development of new housing areas to house the expected Northvolt employees.
Skellefteå Kraft, the power company owned by the municipality, has also invested some 100m kronor in readying the Northvolt site, and risks losing its most important new industrial customer.
