On Aug. 10, Norwegian battery maker Freyr Battery announced a dramatic shake-up: CEO Tom Jensen stepped aside and became executive chair, effective today, replacing founder Torstein Sjøtveit, who retired. In the same announcement, the board said it was moving Freyr’s headquarters from Luxembourg to the U.S.
Investors hardly noticed, but the moves offer insight into the West’s challenge to China’s dominance of the electric vehicle and battery industries. This was plain in Freyr’s choice as the new CEO: chip industry veteran Birger Steen, chair of Nordic Semiconductor and a former senior Microsoft executive. It was the latest example of a Western battery company turning to a tech veteran to navigate the valley of death, the often long, difficult path from making a product to large-scale, profit-making production.
Jensen, the outgoing CEO, said it was the right move: In the West, only Tesla has ever built and run a battery gigafactory, he noted, but semiconductor veterans have scaled up the equivalent—factories that churn out products in the tens of millions. Jensen told me last week that he’s never managed a process through a fivefold increase in output. “Too many people sit for too long in cool positions and just want to sit there for the sake of sitting there,” he said. “I am not that kind of person.”
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