The assets of the Swedish company Saab, which went bankrupt in 2012, including the Trollhättan plant, are now owned by NEVS, which is backed by the debt-ridden Chinese holding company Evergrande group. Things are going so badly that NEVS management recently announced a «freeze» of the company and laid off 320 of the 340 current employees. This is most likely the end.
NEVS (National Electric Vehicle Sweden) is a Swedish company with original Chinese funding. After buying Saab in 2012, NEVS announced its grandiose plans to flood the world with electric cars that were planned to use the achievements of Saab. In its early years, NEVS reported multibillion-dollar contracts in the Chinese corporate sector, but these victorious reports did not help it get the right to use the Saab brand from the eponymous aircraft building holding — it had to be content with its own faceless acronym NEVS.
NEVS 9-3
The first production model of NEVS was a slightly redesigned Saab 9-3 sedan with a battery bolted to the bottom, the novelty was named NEVS 9-3, its production at its own factory in Tianjin, China began in the summer of 2019, but how many cars have been produced there since then and where they disappeared, it is not known — no one saw them on a wide sale. In the same 2019, the Evergrande Group holding bought out a controlling stake in NEVS, and in 2020 it became its 100% owner.
Evergrande is a property development company founded in 1996 in the wake of China's massive residential and commercial development. Thanks to the construction business, Evergrande reached cyclopean proportions and in 2015, foreseeing an imminent crisis in the real estate sector in China, began to look for ways to diversify, and the automotive industry was chosen as one of the promising areas. The matter was not limited to the absorption of NEVS, in 2020 Evergrande also launched its own car company Hengchi Automobile, which rolled out nine electric concepts at once — in the future they were supposed to turn into production models.
Hengchi 5
Investments in the auto business were accompanied by the Evergrande Group's rapid slide into debt, last year the holding's debt reached an astronomical $ 300 billion, but in September, subsidiary Hengchi Automobile nevertheless launched the Hengchi 5 mid-size electric crossover. Alas, already in December, Reuters reported stop production of Hengchi 5 due to the lack of new orders for it, in total at that time less than 400 copies of this model were made.
In turn, NEVS, under the wing of the Evergrande Group, did not introduce a single serial novelty and hit the development of an unmanned (and unpromising) Sango shuttle. The plant in Trollhättan did not release anything after the Saab bankruptcy: I remember that the German startup Sono Motors wanted to organize contract assembly of its Sion solar car here, but then preferred the Finnish Valmet plant, and in February, Sono Motors executives announced the closure of the Sion project due to financial problems.
Evergrande Group is now in bankruptcy and is being sued by creditors. Even last year, Evergrande Group tried to sell NEVS, in January of this year there were rumors that a suitable buyer had been found (who exactly is unknown), but the deal ultimately did not take place. At the end of February, the NEVS press service issued a laconic press release about the company's entry into hibernation mode — a computer term that means about the same thing as hibernation in biology, or, more simply, freezing. Of the company's staff of 340, only 20 were left to maintain minimal economic activity.
During pre-Soviet times, the parking lot at the NEVS plant in Trollhättan was used for a gathering of owners Saab.
In the event of the Evergrande Group's bankruptcy, NEVS could be forced to sell along with the long-dead plant in Trollhättan. It is unlikely that he will be interested in any other car company, if even the quite prosperous Dutch VDL Nedcar cannot find new customers in any way. There is an overabundance of production capacities in Europe now, the labor force is expensive, the social burden is high, and the investment climate against the backdrop of well-known geopolitical events is very bad.