Source: 36 Krypton

Link: https://36kr.com/p/1835700725163011

Date: July 25, 2022

36 Krypton learned that the battery recycling company "Jie Cheng New Energy" recently announced the completion of a series A financing round of over RMB 100 million, led by Bank of China Guangdong Finance, followed by Everbright Holdings, Longgang Golden Holdings (Shenzhen), Xin Yi Capital and other institutions, with Yuewei Capital acting as the company's exclusive financial advisor for the new round of financing. It is understood that this round of financing will be mainly used for battery recycling technology research and development and capacity expansion.

Founded in 2012, Jecheng New Energy is a domestic enterprise focusing on the resourceful and comprehensive utilization of the whole industry chain of retired new energy vehicle power batteries. Jie Cheng New Energy is headquartered in the global lithium industry highlands of the Greater Bay Area, based in Shenzhen, radiating surrounding cities. At present, Jie Cheng has established a whole industry chain of battery recycling and procurement, storage and transfer, secondary use, regeneration and dismantling, chemical smelting, etc., and established a product matrix covering regeneration, secondary and wet process.

With the gradual popularity of new energy vehicles in recent years, the batteries that supply energy to vehicles have also entered a high-speed development stage of recycling and scrapping; at the same time, the supply tension caused by the rising price of upstream raw materials for lithium batteries has also made the recycling of used batteries a windfall.

Zheng Weipeng, founder & CEO of Jie Cheng New Energy, told 36 Krypton that the business direction of Jie Cheng New Energy is currently focused on four areas: secondary utilization, recycling and dismantling, wet smelting and material repair:

The first is the secondary use of used batteries, the battery capacity decay of more than 20% of the power battery, downgraded to use in energy storage, low-speed electric vehicles and other application scenarios. Jebsen New Energy has designed and developed a battery management system specifically for the secondary use of batteries.

The next step is to carry out harmless treatment of different types of waste batteries that cannot be used in a graded manner to meet the requirements of recycling; then the dismantled battery materials are reprocessed through wet metallurgy technology to recover lithium, cobalt, nickel and other metal elements to become raw materials for battery manufacturing again.

In addition, there is also a battery material repair and development business, with battery companies and car companies to establish a battery material targeted recycling mechanism to help companies achieve "waste into raw materials".

Zheng Weipeng told 36 Krypton: the technology of battery recycling is relatively mature, but previously the industry was not large, so there is huge room for improvement in the batch testing of waste battery-related indicators and large-scale processing.

For example, before a used battery can become a gradient battery, it needs to be tested for voltage resistance, remaining cycle times, charging and discharging performance, primary battery module packaging process and other data. Jebsen New Energy has also developed its own testing equipment for these core indicators to quickly read the data.

In the wet metallurgy sector, the traditional mode of the industry was to quench nickel, cobalt and other metals and make precursors and cathode materials through evaporation and crystallisation. But to meet the needs of the new energy vehicle end-of-life battery industry for batch recycling, further breakthroughs in process efficiency are needed.

Zheng Weipeng said that Jie Cheng New Energy is currently developing a new smelting process that will eliminate the 2-3 evaporation and crystallisation processes in between, improving the efficiency of material recycling and saving energy in the workflow.

Last year, the company's battery recycling capacity was around 40,000 tonnes, which is already operating at full capacity. To cope with the industry's demand for large-scale processing, Jebsen New Energy plans to add two new phases of capacity construction in Jiangmen, Guangdong, on top of the capacity of the existing bases in Shenzhen and Huizhou, with the total capacity of the new industrial park expected to exceed 300,000 tonnes. At the same time, Jebsen is also developing the Yangtze River Delta headquarters base, Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, Chengdu and Chongqing and other waste battery recycling and disposal bases.

At present, Jebsen New Energy has established stable cooperation channels with consumer digital companies, battery companies and automobile manufacturers, and its partners cover Apple, VIVO, DJI, Xin Wanda, Yiwei Lithium Energy, BYD, BAIC New Energy and many other well-known companies. Based on the above-mentioned cooperation, Jie Cheng New Energy said the company's revenue last year was hundreds of millions of RMB, and this year is expected to achieve 500% revenue growth.