Stuttgart, Germany - SB LiMotive Co. Ltd, the fifty-fifty joint venture of Bosch and Samsung SDI, started operations on September 1, 2008 with the aim of developing, manufacturing and selling lithium-ion batteries for automotive applications.

The joint venture partners are jointly investing between $300 and $400 million in the next five years and SB LiMotive plans to start series manufacturing of lithium-ion battery systems customized to automotive requirements and to market them worldwide in 2011.

The new company will be led by Youngwoo Park (Samsung SDI), who will be in charge of finance, production, sales, and purchasing, and Dr. Joachim Fetzer (Bosch), who will be responsible for engineering and quality.

SB LiMotive will be headquartered in Suwon, South Korea where battery cell development will be located. Further, initial production of lithium-ion cells is also planned in Korea. About 100 people will be located there. In Germany, a subsidiary based in Stuttgart will be established. Initially 40 people will work at the German subsidiary in sales, marketing and system engineering. The location of the manufacturing sites for battery systems will be announced at a later date.

Bosch and Samsung expect a market volume of some three million hybrid vehicles by 2015.

"We are the first and only automotive supplier with a joint venture to develop lithium-ion batteries for the complex requirements of the automobile," says Wolf-Henning Scheider, president of Bosch's Gasoline Systems division. "Of the 91 million new passenger cars and light trucks worldwide in 2015, we expect that more than three percent will be hybrid and electric vehicles."