Tobias Wuttke is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Business Administration, University of Gothenburg.
Based on interviews with East Asian and European battery firms, policymakers, and industry experts, this paper maps out and examines the emerging European EV battery production network. We find that a battery supply chain is taking shape in Europe but remains overwhelmingly dominated by East Asian firms investing in Central Eastern Europe. South Korean cell makers pioneered European production in the mid-2010s, producing in Poland and Hungary to supply German premium automakers, drawn in by generous government incentives. Since 2023, Chinese battery firms and their material suppliers have also expanded into Europe, pushed by price wars and eroding margins in their domestic market and pulled by European automakers’ reliance on Chinese batteries. Hungary is emerging as a key hub for Chinese investment. In parallel, a Northern and Western European battery supply chain driven by European battery startups and supported by government industrial policies has almost fully stalled. Thus far, no European-owned battery producer has closed the capability gap with leading East Asian producers or achieved competitive production yields at scale. Building on this empirical analysis, the paper explores the implications of Europe’s emerging EV battery production network for existing theories of industrial development in the evolutionary economic geography (EEG) and global production network (GPN) literatures, with particular attention to the role of industrial policy and geopolitics.
