Aju Business Daily

SEOUL -- South Korea's Hyundai auto group tied up with Singapore's SP Group to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles in the sovereign island city-state in Southeast Asia. They agreed to jointly develop a new business model for battery leasing that would allow EV users to lease car batteries.

Hyundais said that it has signed a business cooperation agreement with SP, which operates Singapore’s largest high-speed charging network, to lower the initial cost of purchasing EVs, enhance the accessibility of charging points and build an ecosystem of innovative solutions that can encourage the adoption of EVs in Singapore.

"Through this partnership with Hyundai, we are making low-carbon mobility solutions more accessible to vehicle owners," SP Group CEO Stanley Huang said in a joint statement on November 12. 

In October, Hyundai held a groundbreaking ceremony for its innovation center in Singapore that will act as an open innovation lab for future mobility research and development. Hyundai said the center would feature a landing port for urban air mobility and use eco-friendly energy sources.

"We will strengthen cooperation with various local partners starting with this cooperation," Hyundai's senior vice president Jung Hong-bum said. Hyundai and SP would make a joint study on EV battery utilization and the expansion of EV charging infrastructure and the development of new solutions for battery reuse and recycling to achieve carbon neutrality.

In September, Hyundai joined hands with SK Innovation to cooperate in reusing or recycling spent batteries. EV batteries use chemical energy stored in rechargeable battery packs. Valuable materials in battery packs can be recovered and recycled. South Korean battery makers have developed technologies that can recover key materials in higher purity from spend batteries.

The auto group has enhanced its renewable energy sector as energy storage demand is growing thanks to the global transition from carbon-intensive energy sources to natural gas and renewable source solutions. In September 2019, Hyundai partnered with Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP), the operator of nuclear power stations, to supply energy storage systems using discarded batteries.