Lithium-ion Plant Destroyed Battery shortage fears unfounded after fire, says Matsushita By Yoshika Hara, EE Times Osaka, Japan - There won't be a battery shortage. That's the word from Matsushita Battery Industry Co. officials who, despite an explosion and fire that burned down a subcontracted lithium-ion battery factory, remain confident that they won't face a battery shortage like the one that followed a fire at Sony Corp.'s lithium-ion battery factory in 1995. The latest factory to be destroyed by fire belonged to T&T Dream (Moriguchi, Osaka), a subcontractor of Matsushita Battery that handles the charge/discharge and check processes of cylindrical lithium-ion batteries. Matsushita Battery uses subcontractors as well as three factories of its own, so company officials were confident of averting a shortage. "There will be little impact on supply of lithium-ion batteries to our customers," a Matsushita Battery spokesman said. "We have enough inventory for the time being, as we have taken the measure of risk dispersion by scattering the functions to multiple factories. We will beef up the capacity at those facilities quite soon to cover the damage." Matsushita Battery can produce 6 million rechargeable lithium-ion battery units per month. The company ranked third last year in the production of such batteries in Japan with 14 percent of a 115-million-unit market. Matsushita followed Sony, with 42 percent, and Sanyo Electric Co., with 25 percent, according to a survey by Nikkei Shimbun, a leading economic newspaper in Japan. The company has built a million-unit factory in Wakayama and plans to begin its operation this month. The factory's functions will include those of the T&T facility that was destroyed last month. (Next article.) (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

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