Promoting Plant Construction Overseas
SKC and Lotte Chemical are racing to set up copper foil production plants overseas in a bid to expand their presence in the global market. Copper foil is an anode material for lithium-ion batteries that serves as a pathway for the electric current.
SKC is in the process of selecting a site for its plant in North America. It plans to wrap up the process within this year. For this, it is holding negotiations with several state governments of the United States and Canada.
SKC’s subsidiary SK Nexilis took first place in the global copper foil market with a 22 percent share last year, according to SNE Research, a market research institute. SK Nexilis was followed by China’s Watson (19 percent), Taiwan’s Chang Chun (18 percent), and Iljin Materials (13 percent), which was recently acquired by Lotte Chemical.
SKC dialed up its copper foil production capacity from 20,000 tons in 2019 to 52,000 tons this year. In addition, it plans to scale up its production capacity to 252,000 tons by 2025 by building plants in such countries as Malaysia, Poland and the United States.
SKC invested about 1 trillion won this year to build copper foil plants overseas and is planning to invest another 1 trillion won in North America and Poland in 2023.
Lotte Chemical recently decided to acquire a 53.3 percent stake in Iljin Materials for 2.7 trillion won. Iljin Materials runs copper foil production bases in Korea and Malaysia. It has an annual production capacity of about 60,000 tons. It is planning to build factories in Malaysia, Spain, and the United States to boost its capacity to 225,000 tons by 2027.