Recently, Matsushita, a consumer electronics maker, said that it will issue corporate bonds worth 400 billion yen (about 3.86 billion U.S. dollars), and plans to use most of the proceeds to invest in the Tesla super battery factory Gigafactory. At the same time, Hideki Kawai, Panasonic's managing director, told the media that the plan is to meet Tesla's upcoming Model 3 battery demand.
As of the first quarter of 2016, Panasonic’s operating profit reached 66.9 billion yen (approximately 650 million U.S. dollars) due to the strengthening of investment in auto parts and real estate business, but it was still 76.6 billion yen from the same period of last year. Declined by 12.6%. Despite this, this performance is still higher than Wall Street’s earnings forecast of 60.9 billion yen. At the same time, Panasonic stated that it will maintain its profit forecast of 375 billion yen for the whole year. However, this figure is actually lower than the actual performance of 416 billion yen in the previous fiscal year.
From 2014 to 2015, Panasonic won the world's largest electric vehicle battery maker with annual sales of 2726 MWh and 4552 MWh respectively. In February of this year, another media broke the news that Panasonic will develop a high-performance image sensor for smart driving, and plans to start production in 2020. It can be seen that Panasonic, which has become increasingly marginalized in the traditional home appliance market, is gradually transforming itself into a high-tech auto parts supplier. And the company has stated that in the future, it will not hesitate to sacrifice short-term interests and gradually increase investment in emerging areas such as smart driving to focus on longer-term development.