Exide Technologies: Serving Global Market Needs for Stored Energy

Exide Technologies, with operations in 80 countries and fiscal 2008 net sales of approximately $3.7 billion, is one of the world's largest producers, distributors and recyclers of lead-acid batteries. The Company's four global business divisions – Industrial Energy Americas, Industrial Energy Europe, Transportation Americas, and Transportation Europe – provide a comprehensive range of stored electrical energy products and services for industrial and transportation applications. In addition, Exide’s Asia Pacific/ Rest of World operations are divided evenly between the Industrial Energy and Transportation products and services.

Exide Technologies is a global business organized to serve customers’ complex stored energy systems needs. A key strength of the Company is that its products and services span global markets and geographic borders, melding two significant bases of experience and technology expertise from its Transportation and Industrial battery divisions. The Company shares expertise across business segments. This global footprint enables better and faster means of introducing innovations in products and services, changing the way the world uses and stores electrical energy.

The Exide Transportation Division

Exide’s Transportation Division has headquarters in Alpharetta, Georgia, and Gennevilliers, France. It provides a broad range of starting and deep-cycle batteries for vehicles ranging from garden tractors to cars, pickup trucks, motorcycles, boats, jet skis, golf cars, farm equipment, RVs, motor homes, buses, tractor trailers and military equipment such as tanks and personnel carriers.

Exide supplies the complete transportation supply chain – from OEM assembly plants, to aftermarket product and service support through dealer networks and retailers. The Company’s products can be found as original equipment in top selling passenger cars and trucks in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. With a long history of innovation in transportation market batteries, Exide offers a complete portfolio of goods, services and post-sale support. What’s more, the Company also reclaims and recycles its products at the end of their service lives.

The Exide Industrial Energy Division

The Exide Technologies Industrial Energy division, with headquarters in both Büdingen, Germany, and Aurora, Illinois, manufactures, markets, distributes, and recycles industrial batteries for network power applications such as telecommunications systems, electric utilities, railroads, photovoltaic (solar-power related) and uninterruptible power supply (UPS), and motive-power applications including lift trucks, mining and other commercial vehicles.

Motive Power

Exide’s motive power batteries power lift trucks and other commercial electric vehicles used across the materials handling industry. These vehicles, which move raw materials and finished goods through all parts of the supply chain, including retail stores, logistics hubs, warehouses, cross-docking points and distribution centers, are an integral part of modern materials handling. By extension, motive power batteries are used in applications in which safety, high quality, low emissions and reliability are paramount.

Network Power

Standby power batteries play an important role in 21st century life. Around the world, Exide Technologies’ network power batteries provide energy solutions for critical systems that require uninterrupted supply – such as data networks, railroad crossing signals, industrial controls and e-commerce infrastructure. Not only do these batteries back up traditional wire-line voice networks, but they also provide the backup power supporting reliable high-speed data transmission, Internet service providers, personal and network computer systems, wireless communications and cable TV. Exide's network power batteries also support photovoltaic, wind turbine, and other renewable energy initiatives.

Recycling At Exide

One of the greatest environmental success stories of our time is the recycling track record of the lead-acid battery. Most people don’t know that the lead-acid battery is 99 percent recyclable and recycled more than any other consumer product. Every component of the battery is either directly recycled, converted into marketable byproducts, or consumed as part of the recycling process. That’s why Exide Technologies invests in battery recycling – it is good for business and for the environment.

In 2007, Exide recycled sufficient lead tonnage to make the Company one of the largest secondary lead recyclers in the world. Exide also is a significant recycler of plastic, capturing the plastic from spent batteries and using it in the production of cases and covers for new batteries.

Exide operates 10 recycling facilities around the world – six in the U.S., three in Europe and one in New Zealand. All of them make Exide one of the few companies in the stored electrical energy industry with the capability to recycle its own product in its facilities and produce the same new products from the recycled components.

Through its Total Battery Management [TBMTM] platform, Exide continuously recycles lead and plastic through the life — and afterlife — of batteries. The Company’s recycling infrastructure, consisting of battery manufacturing plants and recycling facilities, combined with a sophisticated distribution network for new and spent batteries, allows Exide to manage the life cycle of its products before and after their service lives. Not many other industries are as proficient.

Battery recycling helps to free customers from handling lead and assures them of a continuous supply of batteries made from high quality recycled materials. It allows Exide Technologies to better manage its inventories for increased productivity at manufacturing sites. Finally, it keeps recyclable materials in the manufacturing stream. Without question, lead-acid batteries are the clean, recycled answer to our energy-hungry society.