Battery maker EnerDel files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy
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Less than a month after laying off all of its workers, Anderson-based battery manufacturer EnerDel Inc. is declaring bankruptcy.
The company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy July 13 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District Court of Indiana, claiming nearly $14 million in assets and $47 million in liabilities, according to the bankruptcy petition.
Chapter 7 bankruptcy, also known as liquidation, involves selling a company’s property and distributing the proceeds to creditors.
An attorney for EnerDel declined to comment when reached by phone Tuesday.
The move was not unexpected. In June, the company fired its workforce without warning, former employees of the company told IBJ. It’s unclear how many workers were affected by the shutdown, but the company reported having 60 employees last year when it was acquired by Paul Herbert, a longtime board member at the company.
Several current EnerDel executives do not live in Indiana, according to the bankruptcy petition, including CEO Steve Heir, who is paid $639,000 a year while living in Reinholds, Pennsylvania, and Chief Strategy Officer Kev Adjemian, who takes home $394,000 in annual compensation while living in Laguna Beach, California.
EnerDel brought in $18.2 million revenue in 2022 and was on track to fall short of that number in 2023, with just $8.6 million in revenue in the first half of the year. It also owed $31 million to more than 200 creditors.
Founded in 2004, EnerDel was one of the first companies to mass-produce lithium-ion batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles. It received $118 million in federal grant funding in the 2009 stimulus package after it pledged to double the company’s U.S. production capacity and hire as many as 2,400 central Indiana workers.
But EnerDel struggled to remain profitable amid sluggish demand for the electric vehicles its batteries were developed to power and faced a major setback when its primary customer, a Norwegian-based electric-car maker, filed for bankruptcy in 2011.
Enerdel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization the following year and was acquired by Boris Zingarevic, a Russian entrepreneur, who shifted the company’s focus to building small grid systems for military bases and supplying power to hybrid and electric city buses.
The company relocated from Indianapolis to Anderson last year after selling its Indianapolis facility to lithium-ion battery maker EnPower Inc., which has been expanding.