State Support for Another Battery Parts Firm in Hungary

A new stakeholder joins the Hungarian electric vehicle manufacturing landscape thanks to Nippon Paper’s investment in Vácrátót, north of Budapest to produce high-performance environmentally friendly cellulose-based additives for batteries, according to the Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency (HIPA).

The company plans to set up an 8,000-square-meter plant in Hungary that is expected to be up and running by the end of 2024. The project is to create around 60 jobs and cost approximately EUR 40 million, some 15% of which is covered by Hungarian taxpayers due to a state subsidy decision by the government.

Japan-based Nippon Paper Group is mainly known for its activities in the pulp and paper manufacturing business, and it operates primarily in Asia, Australia and North America. Given worldwide digitalization and the resulting drop in demand for print products, the company has been shifting its focus towards new areas of development.

One of those fields concerns the chemical industry, namely the manufacturing of CMC (carboxymethyl cellulose), which is one of the materials used for lithium-ion battery anodes in electric vehicles (EV). CMC is a biomaterial made from cellulose, the largest accumulated biomass on earth, thus it is very much environmentally friendly.

Due to its unique properties, it has been widely used as an additive in food and cosmetics as well as in industrial applications such as paper manufacturing. Thanks to Nippon Paper’s own development, however, CMC also serves as a high-performance additive in the coating process for lithium-ion battery anode.