Hitachi and Ricoh bet on modular plants to put Japanese battery gear back in the cost race

Japanese industrial conglomerate Hitachi and imaging-and-electronics group Ricoh are joining forces to build low-cost, modular manufacturing plants aimed at electric-vehicle battery producers, according to Nikkei Asia. The plan, reported on 2 June 2026, marks a deliberate attempt by two of Japan's largest capital-goods companies to re-package the country's deep bench of battery-manufacturing expertise into a form that smaller cell makers — not just the global flagship brands — can afford to buy. The move comes as the global cell-making industry has been consolidating around a handful of Chinese producers and a smaller tier of Korean and Japanese rivals.

The move lands in a market where capital intensity has become the binding constraint. Cell-making capacity has expanded faster than the diversity of customers able to absorb it, and equipment vendors have followed the largest buyers down the cost curve. Japanese suppliers, once dominant in precision manufacturing, lost share as Chinese players — led by Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) and BYD — drove down both cell and equipment costs through scale and state-backed capital. The Hitachi-Ricoh pitch is a structural answer: a smaller, modular factory that lowers the entry ticket for second-tier cell producers.

What the partnership actually involves

Nikkei Asia's reporting, relayed through the outlet's Telegram channel on 2 June 2026, describes the two firms as "Japanese suppliers of battery-manufacturing equipment" teaming up to offer "a cost-effective manufacturing model" — the word "modular" signalling plants built from standardised, repeatable units rather than the bespoke, multi-hundred-million-dollar greenfield facilities that have come to define the global cell-making footprint.

The full text of the Nikkei report was not available in the materials reviewed for this article; the Telegram excerpt was truncated before specifying which battery chemistries, production capacities, or geographic siting the partnership intends to target. Hitachi and Ricoh have not separately published details of the venture as of this writing. The shape of the deal, however, is consistent with what several Japanese capital-goods companies have telegraphed over the past year: rather than chasing the leading Chinese cell makers as customers, sell the factory itself, or a turnkey version of it, to a wider tier of buyers.

Modular manufacturing in this context typically means a plant built in skid-mounted or containerised units that can be shipped, assembled, and scaled in increments. The approach trades some of the unit-economies of a 100-gigawatt-hour gigafactory for dramatically lower upfront capex, faster commissioning, and a smaller minimum efficient scale. For a Japanese equipment industry accustomed to high-precision, high-margin tools, the bet is that "good enough at a price" beats "excellent at a price the market no longer wants to pay."

The cost curve that pushed Japan to this

To understand why Hitachi and Ricoh are moving now, it helps to map where the cost curve has gone. The dominant share of the world's lithium-ion cell production is concentrated in a small number of Chinese manufacturers, with CATL alone accounting for the largest single share of global EV battery shipments and BYD operating the largest vertically integrated cell-to-vehicle operation in the world. Behind them sit a tier of South Korean cell makers — LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, SK On — and a much smaller, more dispersed group of Japanese cell producers including Panasonic.

The equipment that builds those cells has followed the same concentration. Chinese equipment vendors have spent the last decade localising the wet-coating, calendaring, stacking, formation, and testing steps that used to be supplied by Japanese, Korean, and German precision-engineering firms. Beijing's industrial policy — subsidies for upstream materials, tax breaks for cell makers, and direct procurement support for new energy vehicles — created a domestic customer base large enough to amortise equipment-development costs across high volumes. The result is that a Chinese cell maker can buy a complete production line today at a unit cost that Japanese vendors have struggled to match without sacrificing margin.

Japanese capital-goods companies have, until recently, responded by chasing the premium end: higher-yield dry-electrode coating equipment, faster formation-and-aging systems, and quality-control modules aimed at the cell chemistries (lithium-iron-phosphate, sodium-ion, semi-solid-state) where Japanese and Korean firms have retained a technical edge. The Hitachi-Ricoh partnership looks like a more candid acknowledgement that the premium-end strategy alone is too narrow a runway.

The Chinese counter-reading of this story is worth taking seriously. From Beijing's vantage, the Japanese pivot toward modular, lower-cost plants is a sign that the Chinese equipment industry's lead has become durable enough that it is now reshaping the strategic behaviour of established competitors. Chinese state media and industry analysts have, in past coverage, framed Japan's earlier capital-goods strength as a relic of an era when customers had no alternatives; that line of argument would treat the Hitachi-Ricoh move as confirmation rather than disruption. The structural evidence — Chinese equipment vendors now supply a majority share of new cell-manufacturing lines built inside China — supports the Chinese reading more than the Japanese one.

Industrial policy is the larger frame

Neither Hitachi nor Ricoh is making this bet in a vacuum. The Japanese government has spent the last several years under both the Kishida and Ishiba administrations pushing a "battery strategy" that treats cell and equipment manufacturing as core industrial policy, with subsidy programmes, offtake guarantees, and coordinated financing through state-affiliated banks. The Hitachi-Ricoh deal is the kind of partnership that policy is designed to encourage: large established players pooling complementary capabilities to keep a national industrial base in the running.

That logic is not uniquely Japanese. The United States has its Inflation Reduction Act battery provisions, the European Union its Net-Zero Industry Act, India its production-linked incentive scheme, and South Korea a long-standing battery industrial policy rooted in the chaebol model. China, of course, set the template — combining state capital, sovereign offtake, and a protected domestic market to compress the cost curve faster than any market-only competitor could. The Hitachi-Ricoh partnership is, in effect, an attempt to import a piece of that playbook into a Japanese corporate context where direct state ownership is off the table but coordinated industrial action is not.

The China dimension matters here because the structural answer to "why now" is, in part, "because Beijing did it first and did it at scale." Chinese cell makers and equipment vendors have, by any honest accounting, pulled ahead in the cost-and-volume dimension of the battery industry. Acknowledging that does not require treating the Chinese development model as superior across the board — there are legitimate debates about subsidy sustainability, regional concentration risk, and the durability of state-backed advantage. But it does require not flinching from the comparative fact: when the world's largest battery-cell makers are Chinese, the equipment market they create is Chinese-shaped, and the rest of the industry is forced to adapt.

Stakes — and what the wire does not yet tell us

For Hitachi and Ricoh, the partnership is a real-options bet: a small, contained move that, if modular plants take off with second-tier cell makers, opens a multi-billion-dollar annual market for Japanese capital goods; if it does not, leaves the two firms largely where they were. For Japanese industrial policy, the symbolic value may matter as much as the financial one — a visible answer to years of worried commentary about the country losing its manufacturing edge in one of the defining technologies of the energy transition.

For the global battery supply chain, the larger question is whether modular plants represent a real architectural shift or a transitional form. Cell-making is a process industry in which unit costs fall sharply with scale, and the historical pattern has been for newer, smaller production lines to be displaced by larger successors. If that pattern reasserts itself, modular plants will end up as first-stage capacity for emerging-market cell makers — useful, but not durable. If, instead, the industry fragments into a longer tail of regional producers serving localised markets (an outcome the EU's industrial policy seems designed to encourage), modular plants could be the template that lets that fragmentation happen at a price the buyers can pay.

Several specific questions remain unanswered. The truncated Nikkei excerpt reviewed for this article does not specify the partnership's financial structure, target production capacity, geographic focus, or chemistry priorities. It does not say whether third-party equipment makers will be included or whether the modular concept is proprietary to the two firms. And it does not address the question that will determine commercial viability: at what unit cell cost does a modular plant become a rational purchase for a cell maker who could instead buy a larger, cheaper Chinese-built line. The wire has the news; the wire has not yet given us the numbers.

Monexus framed this as a Japanese industrial-policy story, not as a Chinese-industry story, because that is what the lead wire (Nikkei Asia) reports. The China dimension is treated as structural context, sourced to mainstream public references, and presented in line with Monexus's standing China-file practice of steelmanning the Chinese position where evidence supports it.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricoh