Panasonic opens new battery development centre in Japan

Panasonic has attached the new four-storey facility to its existing battery factory in Suminoe (a district of Osaka). It will focus on “next-generation manufacturing” and its results will contribute to “strengthening the company’s competitiveness in manufacturing and expanding global production capacity”. According to Panasonic, Suminoe will become a hub for the development of production process technologies.

With a total area of 7,900 square metres, the new facility will have a pilot production and validation area, according to the company. It will also provide resources for the preliminary testing of mass production systems on a large scale. What’s more, Suminoe will also consolidate and digitalise company-wide data in future: “A data analysis platform will centralize and manage battery data from across all the company’s factories and the material handling will be simulated in order to assess optimum factory layouts,” Panasonic explains in an accompanying press release.

Around 400 production engineers are to be employed at the new site. Including other planned positions that will be created in a new facility for the development of battery cells in Nishi-Kadoma (also in Osaka) from April 2025, around 1,100 employees will be working in battery-related research and development from next year, according to Panasonic. According to Panasonic, this will make it the “largest battery R&D hub in Japan.”

Just under a year ago, Panasonic announced its intention to quadruple its annual production capacity for electric car battery cells to a total of 200 gigawatt-hours by March 2031. Panasonic is increasingly focussing on production in North America. In a strategy presentation published by the entire Panasonic Group at the time, electric car batteries were described as a “priority investment area”. The presentation stated that the company’s round cells should achieve an energy density of 1,000 Wh/l by 2030.

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