From Gigafactories to Collaborative Ecosystems: Rethinking Battery Manufacturing in Europe

Last week, at the Battery Day in the Netherlands, I heard a presentation by Rob W. Postma, Managing Director of Airbus Netherlands. He told the story of how Airbus became a global leader by creating a European-wide collaboration that, within a few decades, managed to overtake Boeing. 

Airbus didn’t try to build everything under one roof. Instead, it mastered the art of distributed manufacturing and cross-border collaboration—leveraging national strengths across Europe and binding them into one coherent whole. 

The message of Mr Postma to the audience of battery professionals was simple - if we could do it, so can you.

The “Moneyball & Moonshots” Perspective 

An article by Charlie Parker on BatteryTechOnline put it nicely: the battery sector often swings between “moneyball” strategies—incremental efficiency gains and cost reductions—and “moonshots”—radical new chemistries and disruptive models. You can check it out here: https://www.batterytechonline.com/battery-manufacturing/moneyball-moonshots-strategies-for-innovation-in-the-battery-industry. 

What caught my attention most was the section on Contract Research Organisations (CROs) and “partners in success.” CROs in pharma showed how companies can outsource specialised R&D without losing speed or quality. Applied to batteries, that could mean new collaborative manufacturing models where specialised players share risk and scale together, rather than each company reinventing the entire value chain in-house. 

This thinking is close to what I’ve been writing about over the past year:

- Could a battery factory operate like a franchise? (spoiler: yes, if we design it right).

- Can Europe build its industry not through copy-pasting Chinese gigafactories, but through leveraging its strengths in distributed supply chains?

- Should we consider hub-and-spoke models that pool investment in cell factories, materials, and equipment across borders? 

You can find these posts on my blog: Franchise model How to build a battery industry Hub & Spoke Model EU battery industry: a new hope 

Why Europe Should Lead With Collaboration 

Chinese and Korean champions perfected the vertically integrated gigafactory model. Europe is unlikely to beat them at their own game. But Europe has something different: a proven track record of collaborative industrial ecosystems—Airbus and ASML being prime examples. 

This culture of distributed production, integration of highly specialised suppliers, and cross-border collaboration is precisely what the battery industry needs. Instead of each startup or OEM building its own silo, we can create networks of partners in success, each contributing to a shared outcome. 

That could mean:

- Electrode foundries serving multiple cell producers.

- Shared R&D hubs acting like CROs for chemistry and process innovation.

- Equipment makers embedding themselves not as vendors, but as co-developers of production lines.

- A fabric of mid-sized specialised players forming a resilient European supply chain. 

The (EU) Future Is Collaborative 

More and more people are now questioning whether a future built solely on giant vertically integrated gigafactories is desirable—or even possible—in Europe. The alternative is not fragmentation, but orchestration: distributed but connected, specialised but aligned. 

Just as Airbus showed, you can build a world leader by spreading production across many regions, if you master governance, quality, and integration. 

For Europe’s battery industry, this might be the smarter “moneyball” path forward. And perhaps the only realistic “moonshot” too. 

What do you think? Is the future of batteries in Europe built on one-roof gigafactories, or on collaborative industrial ecosystems? Or is there a future for Europe in the battery industry at all?