PowerCo Sagunto: Chinese battery maker Gotion takes 49% stake in gigafactory
Chinese battery maker Gotion has become a shareholder in the gigafactory PowerCo is building at Parc Sagunt near Sagunto, taking a 49% stake with an investment that will reach 1,094 million euros (about 1.1 billion euros).
Sources familiar with the process have confirmed to Valencia Plaza (a regional business news outlet) that Chinese battery maker Gotion is finally joining the shareholder group of the battery plant PowerCo, a Volkswagen subsidiary, is building at Parc Sagunt, the industrial estate near Sagunto. Gotion itself reported the deal to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange: it will hold a 49% stake, with an investment reaching 1,094 million euros (about 1.1 billion euros).
The move had been rumoured for months among people following the project. According to a report by valenciaplaza.com in July 2026, Volkswagen was already negotiating the entry of a Chinese partner at the time, though the company insisted it would not give up control of the facility and avoided confirming any final deal. Two months on, those talks have turned into a shareholder agreement that strengthens the international scale of a plant seen as strategic for the group's battery production across Europe.
Gotion is not new to Volkswagen. The Chinese company was founded in 2006 in Hefei, in China's Anhui province, originally under the name Hefei Guoxuan Hi-Tech Power Energy, and the German group already held a 24% stake in it since 2020, when it paid 1.1 billion dollars for that share. The move into Sagunto therefore extends a five-year-old ownership link, not a brand-new relationship. In early 2025 Gotion held a 3.5% share of the global battery market, making it the world's sixth-largest battery manufacturer, with its own factories in Göttingen (Germany) and Fremont (California), plus announced plants in Michigan, Illinois, Kenitra (Morocco) and Valladolid, where it already has an industrial presence in Spain even before entering the Sagunto plant's ownership.
Work on the gigafactory is moving ahead after delays caused by a change of contractor for the design and construction of the clean rooms, the facilities critical to battery manufacturing, which forced a revision of part of the original schedule. The goal now is to finish building the plant's first block this year so production can start in early 2027, while the second complex of this first phase should be completed in the first half of that same year. This initial phase involves an investment of around 3,000 million euros, of which about 1,500 million, half the total, had already been committed and put out to tender in early 2025, on a 1.3 million square metre plot at Parc Sagunt with a starting capacity of 20 gigawatt hours, expandable to 40 and potentially up to 60. The project is expected to create around 3,000 direct jobs and more than 30,000 indirect ones through the surrounding industrial network.
For the town, the timeline is the part that matters most day to day. According to a statement from Sagunto City Council in January this year, the gigafactory was due to start operating this very September, hiring more than 500 workers over the course of the year and giving priority to Sagunto residents for the first posts. Gotion's confirmed entry therefore comes in the same month the plant was supposed to start up, though a new shareholder joining does not by itself confirm whether that hiring timeline will hold as announced.
The deal has had political echoes too. Two weeks after the Gotion talks became known, the regional Industry chief, Marian Cano, sought to reassure people about the plant's timeline, saying works are progressing normally although, she added, the schedule adapts to the company's own investment pace. That official caution contrasts with the interest every piece of news about the plant draws in a town that has made the shift toward the electric-battery industry its main economic bet after decades tied to steel. In Sagunto, people have for some time spoken of the "Volkswagen effect": how the gigafactory's arrival drives not just direct jobs at the plant but also specialised vocational training and housing demand across the Camp de Morvedre district.
With Gotion now part of the ownership structure, the Parc Sagunt gigafactory gains a partner with industrial experience across three continents right at the final stretch of construction, in a project that, based on 2025 figures, remains the largest investment ever announced in Sagunto. The Chinese manufacturer's entry does not, for now, change the hiring timeline the City Council set out in January, but it adds another player whose industrial footprint across Asia, Europe and the United States will be worth watching closely in the coming months, as both the construction work and this year's first hires move forward.
According to valenciaplaza.com. Additional background: Wikipedia, Sagunto City Council, esdiario.com.