China's menswear maker swops stitching for lithium batteries

Beijing

TEN years ago, Ningbo Shanshan Co was primarily a maker of menswear turning out shirts, casual wear and business suits from its base of Ningbo, an industrial hub in China's Zhejiang province. Not any more.

Last week, the company announced that it will spend 3.81 billion yuan (S$781 million) on a new energy storage project in China's northern city of Baotou, bolstering its growing interest in the research, development and manufacture of lithium-ion batteries.

The move is the latest by the Chinese company to become a bigger player in the market for storing electricity for everything from electronic vehicles to laptop computers. It underscores an accelerating shift for a company that got almost all its sales from apparel in 2006. Shanshan is "a serious player in the battery material business, so it's not a surprise" to see its new plan, said I-Chun Hsiao, a Tokyo-based analyst from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. "There's an oversupply …