Sunwoda's billion-dollar financing signals robust investor interest in China's booming EV market, driven by state support
Sunwoda's billion-dollar financing signals robust investor interest in China's booming EV market, driven by state support
Electric vehicle (EV) battery maker Sunwoda charged up its operations with a big-cheque venture deal in mid-August, as investors ride booming electric car sales in China, the world's biggest auto market.
The $1.2bn (RMB 8bn) investment into Sunwoda EVB is the largest EV deal China has seen in nearly a year and the fourth largest in the past decade (Fig. 2). The latest investment into Sunwoda propels the deal into the fifth largest in the APAC region this year (Fig. 1).
With a series A round of over $1bn, Sunwoda EVB is the largest ever early-stage round in the China EV sector, surpassing Honeycomb Energy Technology's $540mn in February 2021. It was led by Meituan, a new investor and food delivery giant, whose CEO Wang Xing has a penchant for backing Chinese EV players. Other new investors include China's first green state fund, the National Green Development Fund, which was established mid-2020 to drive decarbonization and accelerate the economy's green transformation. It made its first investments in three Chinese EV firms, including Avatar and IM Motors.
Established in 2014, Sunwoda EVB is a subsidiary of Sunwoda Electronics, a Shenzhen-listed company founded in 1997 to solely focus on the EV batteries business, which has posted a 584.7% surge in revenue from a year ago, the firm's latest annual results showed. Following the groundbreaking fundraising round, Sunwoda is one step closer to spinning off its electric vehicle battery business into a new company, expected to go public as early as next year.
Sunwoda EVB’s recent series A round has injected a fresh buzz into China’s EV sector as a promising newcomer building on growing momentum. After a drought in billion-dollar EV venture deals in the years following the world’s largest EV battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited’s (CATL) series B $1.2bn round in November 2016, China’s top 10 high-profile deals emerged only in mid-2020 after the height of the pandemic (Fig. 2).
Power your deal-making with accurate and comprehensive private market data and intelligence on investor-backed companies. Get a complete view of the private capital lifecycle with interconnected company, fund and performance data. Find out more about Company Intelligence today.