Belgian company Avesta Battery and Energy Engineering (ABEE) has decided to end its collaboration for the project in Romania but continues to explore other promising locations to support strategic growth, according to a company's statement dating from June surfaced in local media (Economica.net, Ziarul Financiar) on September 23.

ABEE officially unveiled its EUR 1.4 billion project for the construction of an electric Li-ion battery factory for the automotive industry in Galati, eastern Romania, in June 2023. In December 2023, while the project in Romania was awaiting the greenlight for state aid, the company held discussions in Bulgaria.

The project in Romania was announced at an event attended by Belgian prime minister Alexander de Croo, Romania's minister of economy Ştefan-Radu Oprea, former minister of economy Florin Spataru, and Ionut Pucheanu, mayor of Galati, in June 2023.

At the end of September 2023, Pucheanu told Ziarul Financiar that the state aid for the investment was greenlighted.

"Unfortunately, it took longer than we would have imagined or than we would have wanted, both us and especially the investor, who was firmly convinced that things would go faster than that. We are close to settling the issue; once a week or every two weeks when I arrive in Bucharest, I stop by the government to take an interest in how these things are going," Pucheanu said in September 2023.

Mayor Pucheanu said then that the formula for state aid was agreed upon, but the government had to find the source of funding for this state aid. One of the options that the authorities were looking at was the Modernization Fund.

Later in December 2023,  Bulgaria's prime minister Nikolai Denkov said at a press conference following a meeting with the company's CEO Noshin Omar that ABEE plans to invest EUR 1.1 billion in plants to produce lithium-ion batteries in Bulgaria over the next three to five years.

Founded in 2019 by Noshin Omar, a former professor at the Free University of Brussels, Avesta Battery & Energy Engineering (ABEE) currently has two production facilities in Belgium and Macedonia.

iulian@romania-insider.com

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