Varta Is Insolvent: What Happens to Your Batteries Now

Varta, the German battery name that has been on shelves since 1887, filed for insolvency on Friday, 24 July 2026.

Four separate applications went to the district court in Stuttgart: Varta AG itself, plus Varta Microbattery, Varta Micro Production and Varta Storage.

Here is the part most people actually want to know first: the household batteries are not in it.

Varta Consumer Batteries - the AA, AAA and 9V packs you pick up at the supermarket - was legally and financially split off from the group before any of this happened. It keeps trading as normal.

Creditors led by Deutsche Bank, together with several hedge funds, plan to take that unit over themselves. It is profitable and valued at roughly 240 million euros.

So the short answer is that your TV remote is fine.

What actually went wrong

The trouble is in the tiny cells, not the big sellers.

Varta Microbattery makes CoinPower rechargeable button cells - the little discs inside wireless earbuds and hearing aids. Apple was the anchor customer, and in spring 2026 Apple moved AirPods cell sourcing to China.

That pulled the floor out. The Nördlingen plant that made those cells is set to close in the autumn, taking around 350 jobs with it.

In July, shareholders Porsche AG and Austrian investor Michael Tojner both declined to put in more money. Without either of them, the filings were unavoidable.

This is the second rescue in two years. A 2024 restructuring under Germany's StaRUG law wiped out existing shareholders and cut creditor claims, and management declared the job finished in early 2025 - barely fifteen months before this.

Around 4,000 people work for the group, about 3,260 of them at the Ellwangen headquarters. The filings are in self-administration, which means the current board stays in charge under court supervision instead of handing the keys to an outside administrator. CEO Michael Ostermann says the board is working "with all its strength" to save jobs.

Tojner has since signalled interest in buying the microbattery business back, while saying deep cuts would be needed first.

What it means for you

• Household Varta batteries: unaffected. Same brand, same packs, new owners behind the scenes.
• Hearing aid and earbud cells: this is the part under pressure. Supply and pricing could get bumpy.
• Devices you already own: nothing changes. Nobody is switching off anything.

If you use hearing aid cells, coin cells or the odd button battery, this is a good moment to learn what genuinely replaces what. VoltRated keeps a battery equivalents cross-reference that covers the usual traps - LR44 against LR1130, CR2032 against CR2025, and the seven different codes printed on the same physical cell.

And if the news has you rethinking the battery drawer entirely, rechargeable is the cheaper long game. VoltRated's guide to the best rechargeable AA batteries makes the case that higher mAh on the label is not automatically better, which is the mistake most people make.

While we are on earbuds

One footnote for our usual crowd. The cell inside your earbuds decides how long they last - the Bluetooth codec decides how they sound, and that one you can actually control.

On Android, Bluetooth Codec Changer forces your phone onto LDAC, aptX or AAC instead of letting it default to low-quality SBC. On a PC, our LDAC on Windows 11 guide covers which headphones can take advantage of it.

A 139-year-old brand losing one Apple contract and collapsing inside eighteen months is a rough story, and 350 people in Nördlingen are wearing the worst of it.

But the batteries with the red-and-blue label are the one part of Varta that still makes money, which is exactly why they were carved out first. Those are not going anywhere.