China’s Hello Bike going to the court to challenge the performance of LG Chemical battery performance

On November 26, a Chinese Business Management Paper has reported that a bicycle-sharing company, Hello Bike, filed a complaint with LG Chemical's Nanjing subsidiary to the Shanghai Municipal Intermediate People's Court. Hello Bike is one of the three largest bike sharing companies in China, along with Mobike and ofo.

The legal representative of Hello Bike said in an interview with the Chinese Business Management Paper, "Although we did not directly sign a contract with LG Chem, the damage caused by the battery made by LG Chem gave rise to our damage, accordingly, this created a right-and-violation relationship” and said, “we demand compensation for the infringed rights in accordance with the articles of Product Liability Law (产品质量法) and Infringement Liability Law (侵权责任法).”

According to the Chinese Business Management Paper, Hello Bike recalled hundreds of thousands of bicycles that could not be operated due to the lack of a signal this summer. And when they randomly selected 2000 bikes and disassembled them, all showed a malfunction in their lock batteries. Hello Bike claims that it is due to LG Chem's small cylindrical rechargeable battery 'INR 18650 M26' that can not tolerate hot weather.

"If you take a bicycle for 1,000 yuan (160,000 won), the damage will be at least 100 million yuan (16.3 billion won)," Chinese Business Management Paper reported and said, "If you take into account the time that people could not use the bicycle, it would have caused a lot of loss."

If the litigant's address is not Shanghai, such as the Nanjing subsidiary of LG Chem, a lawsuit can be filed with the Shanghai Municipal Intermediate People's Court when the value of the lawsuit exceeds 50 million yuan (8.2 billion won). In the same case, if the value of the lawsuit exceeds 300 million yuan (49 billion won), the Supreme People's Court will take the first case. The Chinese legal system is a two-part system.

"We used Samsung SDI and Great Power of China products together, but the problem was found only in LG Chem batteries," said Hello Bike. Hello bike sued with eight battery pack makers that made battery packs using LG Chem battery cells. The battery pack maker connected and packed three standard 18650 (diameter 1.8 cm, height 6.5 cm) battery cells and made them into a battery pack for the power supply of the lock, and delivered the battery packs to Hello Bike.

"We have used several branded battery cells, but the quality of LG Chem is the worst," said Ricky Lee, President of Hello Bike, on the social network service (SNS). "Not to mention Samsung SDI of Korea, it cannot reach the quality of a local battery business,” said China battery enterprise alliance (CBEA), the local battery specialist media company.