On June 20-21, 2016, the People's Government of Qinghai Province, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the China Electric Vehicle Association (C EVAA) held the International Summit Forum on "Lithium Industry - New Ecology" in Xining, Qinghai. This forum is one of the important activities of the "17th China Qinghai Green Development Investment and Trade Fair", reflecting the theme of "open cooperation? Green development" theme. Sina Motors reported the whole forum live.

The Forum is divided into two parts: the Summit Forum and the Roundtable. The theme of the Summit Forum is "Building a new ecology of sustainable development of lithium industry", which will focus on the international concern of the industry innovation chain, industrial chain cooperation for in-depth exchanges, discuss policies, cooperation and how to build a new ecology of sustainable development of lithium industry.

Sokyu Ikoma, Chief Technology Officer, AIS, Panasonic CorporationPanasonic Corporation, Chief Technology Officer, AIS, Sokyu Ikoma

The following is an excerpt from a speech by Sokyu Ikoma, Chief Technology Officer of AIS at Panasonic Corporation:

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak. I am from Panasonic, and today I will be presenting our activities in the automotive battery industry.

My speech today consists of three main parts:

First, a brief introduction to Panasonic.

Secondly, we would like to introduce our business activities in China.

Thirdly, we will talk about our future market development trends and the automotive battery development strategy we have adopted.

First, let me introduce Panasonic.

Panasonic consists of four companies, there is the electrical appliances company, there is the eco-solutions company, the AVC network company and the automotive industrial systems company, which is also known as AIS. We produce different electronic products, such as PCs, notebooks, etc., which serve the AVC Networks Company. We at AIS provide products and services to the automotive industry. The share of AIS in the Panasonic Group is very large, and in 2015, sales have exceeded 36% in the whole Panasonic.

We would like to introduce our business in the global market.

We hope to contribute to the creation of a sustainable society, and in 2018 we aim to realize our Green Plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, as well as to improve the recycling of natural resources, and to achieve our goals for water, chemicals, and biodiversity through the products we develop. Another strategy is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

In terms of product development, our contribution is to help users improve the efficiency of their energy use. At a green energy park in Japan, we have already achieved our goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 1,300 tons, so Panasonic will continue to focus on our green goals for 2018.

This is our strategy for the automotive industry, which divides the industry into three parts: comfort, which means that we want to provide customers with a very comfortable driving experience; safety, which means that we want to have products with safe driving performance; and the environment, which means that we want to increase the number of globally environmentally friendly products. As you can see here, our entire automobile is in such an environment, and we expect sales of more than 1.3 trillion yen starting in 2013. Based on our current energy and power increase technology, we hope to systematize our entire product lineup, so we hope to have sales of more than 2 trillion yen in 2019.

I would like to introduce some of AIS's main products in the automotive field. As we said before, automotive batteries are part of the environment, and as you can see, we have different products from the cells to the battery system, as well as charging systems and other products that are very critical for an environment like an electric vehicle. We have a lot of products in comfort, including navigation, and we are constantly developing new products in this area, including on-board displays and next-generation advanced entertainment technologies. On the safety side, there are sensors, there are cameras and so on, and there are a range of products in all product areas. Batteries for electric vehicles are also a very important product for us.

In addition, we will focus on the automotive battery industry. Panasonic has more than 12 years of history in commercial automotive batteries, and will produce different cells and battery systems. So far, our products are used in 45 models, and 41 more models are under development for the future. According to our overall mass production capacity, there are about 80% of lithium-ion round batteries, about 20% of lithium-ion square batteries, and finally a portion of nickel-metal hydride batteries.

Next, I would also like to share with you Panasonic's business development in China. So far, Panasonic's most important production bases in China, in terms of automobiles, there are nine major factories in operation, of which Wuxi, Suzhou and so on are very important production bases, mainly ICE internal combustion locomotive vehicles. The new energy vehicle side will be in Dalian production base, is expected to start production of environmentally friendly lithium-ion batteries in 2017, as well as our overall battery pack and management system services.

In China, Panasonic also has eight sales bases covering all major Chinese automotive markets. Panasonic's China headquarters is now in Shanghai, and we will work hard to develop eco-vehicles in the future, hoping to add more batteries and build closer relationships with customers, as well as participate in the standard-setting process.

In the third part of my speech, I would like to share with you what Panasonic sees as market trends and Panasonic's strategy for automotive battery development.

We expect that the demand for effective automotive batteries will grow by more than 81 TP3T per year, and you can see in different areas that there will be different variations. Behind this you can see that it is the change in regulatory requirements in each region that will bring about such requirements. For example, the U.S. will have zero-emission vehicles, the same Europe will have very strict carbon emissions planning, in China there are new energy vehicle standards, as well as fuel requirements. Because of the differences in requirements in each region, environmentally friendly vehicles are being developed extensively around the world. We can see that different types of vehicles, including PHEV, HEV, EV will continue to rise, especially PHEV and EV demand will have a rapid rise, because there is such a large demand, the Chinese market will show very good growth trend, is expected to become the world's number one market for environmentally friendly vehicles in 2025.

Next, I will explain to you specifically our development strategy in this area. So far, we have focused on EVs and PHEVs because there will be a relatively large incremental demand here. We expect that there will be a higher demand for EVs or PHEVs in the future, and we will continue to develop cells and modules as well as battery systems for these vehicles based on the needs of our customers. We will continue to develop cells and modules as well as battery systems for these vehicles based on customer demand. We also hope to provide optimal solutions for all customers with our technologies and products. For electric vehicles, we also want to increase the energy density to increase the mileage, and we do this through design, chemistry and process innovation. We want to increase 100% in the future, and for electric vehicles I think that's the next generation of technology that's needed. That's our plan for the future, and we'll continue to increase our R&D efforts and our investment in key technologies to enhance our process planning and chemistry.

Regarding the next generation of technology, we see that higher energy density will be required, so on this page you can see the difference between the different product iterations, as you can see, the bottom right corner is the current lithium-ion batteries, which will go to the next stage around 2020, and there may be a new kind of batteries like this after the lithium-ion, let's say there will be metal-air batteries and multivalent ion batteries, which is what we will be asking for in the future. In Japan, there is such a program as RISNIG, and we hope to achieve low cost, high safety, and high capacity of batteries. We are hoping to develop and innovate a new generation of batteries through this program. This program is joined by many companies and is an important goal for our future.

To conclude, in order to further strengthen Panasonic's business growth, automotive will be an important business area for us, and China is also a market that we are highly concerned about, we will continue to invest efforts in China to strengthen not only production and investment, but also to strengthen research and development in this area, and to join the standardization of China, in the hope that we can further contribute to the development of China's green vehicles. Thank you all for listening!