Aeroborn CEO Man Yong Toh is in Stockholm for Switched On: Towards More Battery Sovereignty, a closed-door roundtable convened by the Loom Strategy Centre.

The gathering brings together voices from across Europe's battery value chain — spanning automotive, energy, defence, policy and industry — to address one of the continent's most pressing strategic questions: how to build a resilient, sovereign European battery sector before dependency on external supply chains becomes irreversible.

Batteries have moved beyond their role as an automotive component. They are the foundation of grid flexibility, industrial electrification, and increasingly, European defence readiness. As geopolitical pressures mount and the energy transition accelerates, the ability to produce, recycle and secure battery materials within Europe's borders has become a matter of national and collective security — not only industrial policy. The roundtable brings this reality into focus, convening stakeholders who rarely share a table: automotive, energy, defence and policy actors working on different timelines but facing the same underlying vulnerability.

The conversation will centre on the structural constraints holding back European battery production, the trade-offs between cost competitiveness and strategic autonomy, and what it would take to make European demand bankable for domestic producers. For the defence sector in particular, the question is stark: platforms, systems and infrastructure that depend on batteries cannot be strategically autonomous if the materials underpinning those batteries remain sourced from a single dominant geography.

For Aeroborn, these are not abstract questions. Our work at the Port of Rotterdam is precisely about closing one of the most critical gaps in Europe's battery value chain: the recovery and upgrading of anode materials from spent lithium-ion batteries. Europe exports its battery waste and imports its graphite — almost entirely from China. Aeroborn is working to reverse that logic, recovering battery-grade graphite and few-layer graphene from black mass through our proprietary electrochemical process, independently validated by Bournemouth University.

The strategic case is clear. No European producer yet features among the world's largest battery manufacturers by volume, and with new EU regulations mandating minimum recycled content in batteries from 2030, the window to establish a domestic materials loop is narrowing. Supply chain resilience is not a long-term ambition — it is an immediate operational requirement for energy system operators and defence procurement alike. Aeroborn's technology is designed to operate inside that window: circular, European, and technically validated.

Discussions like this matter because the bottlenecks are not purely technical. Regulatory frameworks, demand signals, financing structures, and cross-sector coordination all shape whether European battery sovereignty becomes a reality or remains an aspiration. Aeroborn is committed to contributing to that conversation — in policy forums, in standards bodies, and at the production level.

We thank the Loom Strategy Centre for the invitation and for convening a conversation that takes the urgency of this challenge seriously.