Renewed Push for Vehicle Batteries
SK Innovation is expanding its electric vehicle battery business. It has broken ground on a battery factory in China to take part in a competition with global players, including Japan’s Panasonic, China’s CATL, and Korea’s LG Chem and Samsung SDI.
On August 22, SK Innovation announced that the company finally chose Changzhou, Jiangsu Province as home to an electric vehicle battery cell factory in China and started groundwork. The factory will be able to produce batteries of 7.5GWh per year, which can be used for 150,000 units of high-capacity electric cars (50KWh).
In addition to the Changzhou factory, the company plans to build a 20GWh electric car battery production system by 2022 by expanding the capacity of its Seosan factory in Korea’s South Chungcheong Province to 4.7GWh, and building a 7.5GWh battery plant in Komarom in Hungary for which ground was broken in March.
SK Innovation has been producing battery packs with a joint venture in China, using the cells supplied by its Seosan plant, and sold them to global automobile companies such as Mercedes-Benz.