- Varta supplies microbatteries to the likes of Apple, Samsung and Jabra
- Michael Tojner had bid for Varta when the company was facing negative cash flow
- The overall micro battery market is estimated to grow from $128 million in 2019 to $631 million by 2025
Apple’s Airpods have become one of the most selling earbuds in the world. While the Cupertino-based company has made significant amount of revenues by retailing these, Varta, a company into supplying microbatteries for these has also created a fortune. Michael Tojner, who bid for Varta in 2007 and bought it for $40 million, as per a report by Forbes, is now a billionaire.
Tojner told Forbes that he was the only one to bid for Varta back in 2007. Varta, at that time, was facing the problem of negative cash flow. Tojner also pointed towards the contract for manufacturing and supplying batteries for Airpods to Apple.
The overall micro battery market, as per a report by Markets & Markets, is estimated to grow from $128 million in 2019 to $631 million by 2025, at a CAGR of 30.4 per cent between 2019 and 2025. The growth of this market will be propelled by growth in the adoption of wearable devices, inherent advantages of micro batteries, need for compact batteries in medical devices, and increasing demand for thin and flexible batteries in IoT devices.
50 per cent market share in premium batteries market
The deal with Apple, as per Tojner, helped Varta to gain 50 per cent share in the market of batteries for wireless earbuds. Tojner’s company, after the deal with Apple, also signed contracts with the likes of Samsung and Jabra.
It is to be noted here that Apple’s Airpods had acquired 71 per cent of the revenue generated in the true-wireless-headphones market. Apple, as per a report by Canalys, shipped 18.3 million sets of Airpods in the year. Samsung, as per the report, captured around six per cent of the market in 2019.
Enormous potential in the microbatteries segment
Tojner told Forbes that there is enormous potential in the microbatteries segment. The market for the same will increase as there will be no phone in the next ten years without an ear application.
He referred towards batteries used in earbuds as one of the most expensive components and said that while these are expensive but consumers won’t trust the brand if the batteries stop working after eight to nine months.
Varta makes batteries for automotive, consumer electronics and microbatteries.
