Tiger Group has announced a two-day online auction, scheduled for November 12 and 13, to liquidate approximately $74 million in assets from Natron Energy’s closed sodium-ion battery R&D facility in Santa Clara, California, and its manufacturing plant in Holland, Michigan. The assets include battery manufacturing equipment and engineering tools suitable for EV and industrial battery production.

The Santa Clara and Holland facilities together cover more than 250,000 square feet. The auction features equipment from leading brands like Hitachi, Itech, Frontier LLC and Xingtai Naknor. Many items are new or have seen minimal use, with the Michigan facility’s equipment installed only one year ago.

Key technical assets available from the Santa Clara R&D site include a battery production line from Guangdong Honbro Tech with an automatic Z-stacking machine, pouch forming die, top edge and side sealing machine, and Branson welders. Additional intem include a Frontier LLC slot die coater, Xingtai Naknor rolling press machine with chillers, DEC Group powder transfer system, MBRAUN modular glove boxes, Trumpf TruLaser Station 7000 CNC laser, Itech bidirectional DC power supplies, and Arbin and Biologic battery testing systems.

The Holland, Michigan plant auction features a 2023 Hanwha cell assembly line rated at 10 cells per minute, a formation line with Fanuc R-2000ic robot, electrode stackers, roll-to-roll vacuum drying cells from E&R, pouch forming equipment, a JR Automation semi-automated laser weld machine, and a suite of engineering and quality control apparatus such as humidity chambers, drying and vacuum ovens, and Shimadzu IRTracer-100 spectrophotometers. The equipment caters to sodium-ion battery cell manufacturing and related quality control processes.

Auctions for the Santa Clara assets close on November 12 at 10:30 am PT, and Holland’s assets close on November 13 at 10:30 am PT.

Source: Tiger Group