Increasing Battery Investment

 

SK Innovation is mulling over expanding its Lithium-ion battery separator (LiBS) production facilities. At present, the company is running nine LiBS production facilities in total, including one located in Cheongju that was recently put back into operation, with global battery demand on the rise.

SK Innovation can cement its No. 2 position in the industry by expanding its facilities. As of this year, SK Innovation produced 70 million and 180 million square meters of LiBS in Cheongju and Jeungpyeong, respectively. It is second only to Asahi Kasei in terms of market share – 39 percent vs. 18 percent – while leading Toray by a margin of approximately three percentage points.

In the meantime, Samsung SDI recently took 58 percent and 28.2 percent of the shares of STM previously owned by Samsung Fine Chemicals and Toda Kogyo to turn the cathode active material producer into its fully-owned subsidiary. Industry experts point out that this is to boost its competitiveness in the battery materials sector and catch up with LG Chem.

LG Chem is currently working on manufacturing facilities in Europe to produce batteries for use in electric vehicles and energy storage systems. In addition, it is considering building more production facilities in Nanjing, China for next-gen batteries such as stepped ones. “We raised our rate of operation from 60 percent to over 70 percent between last year and this year to meet the rapidly increasing EV battery demand, but the supply of LiBS is still tight,” it said.

These days, the demand for larger batteries for industrial applications is rising in emerging economies as well as the United States and Europe. According to KOTRA, industrial battery consumption in Pakistan jumped from 1.25 million to 1.38 million units between 2013 and last year, and to more than 1.53 million this year. Under the circumstances, the global market size is estimated to grow about four-fold from US$5.64 billion to US$19.56 billion between 2015 and 2020.

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