Coppola: Manufacturing requires massive upfront capital and volume unlike software
Gabrielle Coppola · The fall of a battery maker still haunts America · Jun 14, 2023 · at 9:15
Automotive journalist Gabrielle Coppola discusses the capital intensity and capacity utilization challenges battery startup A123 Systems faced compared to software businesses.
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“Anyone who's, you know, familiar with manufacturing, you know, it's a lot tougher than like, oh, hey, I just wrote an app, and now I'm generating some revenue or something. You basically invest billions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars up front And then in order to actually make a return on that investment, you need volume. You need to make a lot. You need to utilize all of that capacity that you just invested in.”
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