A car made by a Bio energy company

In the language of business, there are two types of business merger and acquisition. The first type, for example if a car manufacturer acquired a transmission company, then this is called a horizontal integration. On the other hand, the Hooters restaurant company acquired the Pace Airlines to form the Hooters Airlines back in 2002, which sounds strange (why a food business want to participate in the air transportation industry?), this is called a vertical integration.

Back in June 2012, a Hong Kong energy company: National Bio Energy Group, teamed with a Japanese venture investment company called “Sun Investment”, formed a subsidiary called NEVS (Nation Electric Vehicle Sweden), and then use the NEVS to successfully bought the financially stressed Sweden auto maker Saab.  The bio energy company holds 51% of the total equity and the Japanese holds the other 49%.

The National Bio Energy Group’s main business is using bio materials for electric power generation. Obviously this is a vertical integration. From the name of the subsidiary company, it is clear that the new Saab company owner intends to steer the car maker’s future direction to electric vehicles.

The following image is the ePower concept build by Saab back in 2010, not the latest electric 9-3.

During the past 2 years, Saab was busy with an electric version of the 9-3 model. Now news come out that the first batch of the new electric 9-3, will be shipped to Qingdao, China for testing. The current electric car can only go 20 miles for a full charge, obviously not enough for practical use. But NEVS has already planned to make improvement on this, and are going to start selling the production electric 9-3 in 2015.

Of course NEVS is still producing gasoline engine version of the 9-3 and it is already in the Sweden market.

In the following several months, let’s see what magic can the bio energy company do to make the electric 9-3 an appealing car in US market – because US is currently the largest electric car market in the world and I do not believe NEVS will ignore us.