China is the real target of the White House in the global geopolitical arena. The Biden administration, to say, has launched a real war on chips a few weeks ago, with a halt to exports, to damage Beijing’s tech industry and maintain a competitive advantage. Meanwhile, something else happens in the real world. Ford has signed an agreement with PT Vale Indonesia and China’s Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt to build a nickel processing plant, valued at approximately $4.5 billion. Tesla draws plans to manufacture batteries in Texas under license from Chinese giant CATL, which in 2022 boasted nearly 40% of the global market share.
Nickel, for Ford target 120 thousand tons per year
The Blue Oval operation is expected to produce 120,000 tonnes a year of mixed hydroxide precipitate, a material extracted from nickel ore that would be used in electric vehicle batteries.
Indonesia, which has the largest nickel reserves in the world, has been trying to develop refining industries, with ambitions to produce batteries and eventually electric vehicles as well. Vale and Huayou started construction on the plant in November. The signing follows a non-binding memorandum of cooperation for the plant that the three companies signed last year. The stated goal is to complete the project in 2025. The Jakarta government has banned the export of unprocessed nickel ore since 2020 to ensure supplies for existing and potential investors.
Ford itself has once again raised the price of its popular F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck, the latest in a series of hikes aimed at offsetting high costs. The base variant of the electric pickup now starts at nearly $60,000, nearly 50 percent higher than last year’s introductory price.
Ford’s hike comes after competitor Tesla waged an outright price war, cutting instead very aggressively. Ford said a week ago that its electric vehicle business unit is on track to post losses of $3 billion in 2023, while targeting an 8% pre-tax margin by the end of 2026.