Recently, some Swedish media outlets have claimed that untested Chinese-made machinery was responsible for the bankruptcy of the country's well-known battery maker Northvolt. In response, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Sweden said that attributing Northvolt's bankruptcy to a Chinese equipment supplier is baseless, completely untenable, and a typical case of scapegoating and shifting blame.

Northvolt traces its origins to 2015, when former Tesla executives founded SGF Energy to develop batteries for electric vehicles. In 2017, it was renamed Northvolt. Over the following years, it raised more than 15 billion USD in funding, secured 50 billion USD in orders, and announced plans to build six gigafactories across Europe and North America. Its rise was meteoric, and its fall abrupt. In November 2024 and March 2025, Northvolt filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States and Sweden, respectively.

Rumors linking Northvolt's collapse to Chinese machinery first surfaced in September 2024. Lars Wilderäng, a bestselling Swedish author, alleged in his personal blog that the lithium-ion battery production equipment supplied by the Chinese company Wuxi Lead Intelligent Equipment suffered from major defects and had effectively "brought Northvolt down." Wilderäng even speculated that Chinese firms had deliberately sabotaged Northvolt in order to acquire it after bankruptcy. Such conjecture, it must be said, aligns more with his professional background as a science-fiction novelist than with industrial reality.

Even a basic application of common sense shows how implausible it is to attribute Northvolt's failure to Chinese equipment suppliers. Wuxi Lead Intelligent Equipment is a global leader in new-energy manufacturing equipment. In 2024, its orders accounted for 22.4 percent of the global market, with certain products holding a market share exceeding 65 percent worldwide. All equipment exported to the European Union strictly complies with international standards and has passed CE certification by independent third-party agencies, fully meeting EU safety and technical requirements. Claims of "untested" machinery or "technical defects" therefore simply have no validity.

Wuxi Lead Intelligent Equipment's equipment is sold across multiple countries and regions, and has long served leading new-energy companies in Germany, France, Hungary, and beyond. It maintains long-term partnerships with nearly all major global battery manufacturers, including CATL, BYD, Tesla, and Samsung SDI. Additionally, its production lines operate stably worldwide, recognized by international markets.

Notably, a Northvolt engineer with the username "circuspabygget" wrote on the U.S.-based forum Reddit that there was no evidence of deliberate sabotage, calling Wilderäng's claims pure conspiracy theory. In his view, the primary cause of Northvolt's collapse was poor decision-making by management, especially the persistent expansion projects made despite output falling far below expectations.

The facts support this assessment. From its inception, Northvolt devoted enormous energy to media promotion, fundraising, and aggressive expansion, while failing to establish even the most basic manufacturing capabilities. Manufacturing performance relies on far more than machinery alone. According to an investigation by Swedish newspaper Norran, Northvolt's production lines were plagued by management chaos and chronic inefficiency. Insiders also revealed that up to 80 percent of its products failed to meet quality standards, largely due to fundamentally flawed process design.

The resulting soaring costs and revenue losses were inevitable. As financing dried up, the company collapsed. Statistics show that between January and September 2023, Northvolt lost over 100 million USD per month, yet delivered only 79.8 megawatt-hours of batteries — less than 0.5 percent of its planned 2024 capacity.

In fact, Northvolt's fate was clear from the very beginning. According to The Aleph Report, a European technology news outlet, for a company claiming to revolutionize green energy cells, Northvolt's leadership team had no actual experience in this field. Not a single senior executive had built a battery factory before, let alone a competitive cell manufacturing business.

This raises an obvious question: how did a company with no expertise secure tens of billions of dollars in funding? Here, too, the "China factor" played a role. Northvolt consistently promoted its mission as helping Europe achieve battery self-sufficiency and reduce reliance on China. By politicizing industrial development, it successfully attracted backing from several European governments and investment institutions

The irony is striking. A company that championed independence from China in fact imported large quantities of machinery and raw materials from China — only to have some media outlets then blame its collapse on Chinese equipment.

Northvolt's bankruptcy has inflicted heavy losses on investors and dealt a serious blow to the development of Europe's new-energy industry. Sweden can draw lessons from this fiasco, abandon protectionist and one-sided thinking, and stop spreading misinformation. Only by adopting a rational and pragmatic approach can China and Sweden advance mutually beneficial cooperation in the new-energy sector and jointly safeguard the stability and smooth functioning of global industrial and supply chains.