Reliance Industries pushes battery unit timeline by 2 years to 2026

Timelines for Mukesh Ambani promoted Reliance Industries (RIL)’s giga-scale battery factory, is now set for 2026, two years later from the earlier shared timeline of 2024, information shared by the billionaire in his recent speech suggests. This would be one of the rare instances, where the company has changed a stated timeline or target for any business outcomes.

RIL did not confirm or respond to email queries related to the delay. However, industry executives speculate supply-chain constraints could be a contributing factor.

At RIL’s annual general meeting (AGM) in August, Ambani, chairman and managing director for the company, informed shareholders, “Our concurrent priority is to set up our Battery giga factory by 2026.” Ambani indicated RIL will start with LFP chemistry and simultaneously, will focus on fast-tracking the commercialisation of its sodium ion battery technology. “We will build on our technology leadership position by industrialising sodium ion cell production at megawatt level by 2025, and rapidly scale up to giga scale thereafter,” Ambani said.

This is a two-year shift in timeline, from the earlier indicated," We aim to start production of battery packs by 2023 and scale up to a fully integrated 5 GWh annual cell to pack manufacturing facility by 2024, and further scale up to 50 GWh annual capacity by 2027,” according to Ambani’s AGM speech a year ago.

RIL’s planned giga factory is expected to manufacture battery chemicals, cells and packs, leading all the way up to containerised energy storage solutions, and will include a battery recycling facility to deliver a truly integrated ecosystem. At present, no such factory of similar scale is operational in India, as the country’s battery-manufacturing capabilities is nascent.

“They seem to have technology tie-ups done particularly on lithium ferro phosphate (LFP) side. But it's unclear whether they have all the supply chain tie-ups or not. Needless to say, building a plant takes time,” said an executive from the battery-related ecosystem in India.

In the last two years, RIL has made a string of acquisitions to tie-up the requisite technologies both for lithium-ion and sodium-ion based battery manufacturing. The company acquired assets of LFP batteries provider Lithium Werks for USD 61 million in 2022. In 2021, RIL acquired leading global sodium-ion battery technology company Faradion for an enterprise value of GBP 100 million.

A senior oil and gas analyst agreed instances of RIL missing a stated timeline is rare. “The only instance I remember is of KG-D6,” said the former research head for a domestic brokerage firm. Ambani has often used AGM speeches to announce timelines for new business initiatives or targets such as debt reduction. Similarly, the AGMs are also used to indicate achieving the stated target before the deadline. For instance, in July 2020, Ambani informed shareholders, “In last year's AGM speech, I had shared my goals of growing our businesses through partnerships and achieving a Net Debt Free Balance Sheet. I am happy to report that we have fulfilled this promise well ahead of the timelines that we had set ourselves.”