People who have experience with how IKEA do said this product will be replaced by a similar one and only management knows.
I suspect they won’t replace them with better ones or simply rebrand them because it’s a loss leader product and selling a set of batteries every 4 years at a loss is no fun compared to selling batteries every 6 months at a profit.
My uneducated guess is they will start selling chinese eneloops or even worse, chinese ‘LSD’ cells.
The OEM-equivalent to these are eneloop pro and they’re not 7$ a pack, I can tell you that much.
Since Amazon Basics Batteries previously and up till now IKEA LADDA batteries used to be ‘made in Japan’, this also means the FDK manufacturing plant, which is the only NiMH plant in Japan afaik, will have less production output and less customers.
Also, Fujitsu NiMH seem to be going away? Nkon.nl can’t get them anymore, nowhere else in europe you can buy them and I’m surprised to see how little you can find on Amazon.co.jp but maybe I’m just using the site wrong?
As far as I can tell, the only customers left for the FDK plant are eneloop and Toshiba impulse?
I hope this is not the end of japanese LSD cells.
So stock up while you still can and maybe write an angry letter to IKEA management
As of 6 May 2021 there is no ‘Last chance to buy’ message for either the AA or AAA LADDA cells on Ikea’s Australian site.
Edit: The AA cells are out of stock in the UK and Ireland, but there is no last chance message on the AAA cells. Canada has the last chance message on both AA and AAA.
I ordered 3 packs from the website. These are usually sold out in stores in the Maryland area, especially this past year. Maybe COVID related, who knows. Last chance message convinced me !
Nice to have no matter what happens in the future.
They won’t ship to my state apparently. They don’t have a store in my area. I guess they don’t want my money. I was looking into getting more nimh, the last ones I got were the Japanese amazon basics ones. Now amazon basics are the crappy chinese ones. Seems like Eneloop are my only good option.
Edit: I tried again and now it lets me check out, but once shipping is added It seems about the same price as buying eneloops on amazon with free shipping. I guess these are only a deal if you get them in the store.
Edit some more: Oh the Laddas are the Eneloop Pros right? So yea they are a good bit less but I’d rather have more charge cycles than a little higher capacity.
Still in stock for me here in Sydney the AA’s are at $15 a pack. I bought a bunch of Coles branded NiMH on clearance not to long ago They are okay so far.
