A Foothold for Penetration of European Cable Market
LS Cable & System Ltd., South Korea's leading wire and cable manufacturer, announced on May 15 that it held a completion ceremony for its new cable production plant in Dzierzoniow in the southwestern region of Poland on May 14. The company has become the first South Korean cable maker to have a production base in Europe. The new factory will produce parts for electric vehicle batteries and optical cables for communication.
The completion ceremony was attended by nearly 100 executives of the firm and other government officials, including Koo Cha-yub, chairman of LS Cable & System, Myung Roe-hyun, CEO of LS Cable & System and Dariusz Kucharski, mayor of Dzierzoniow.
"LS Cable is pursuing a localization strategy. The Polish plant will serve as the key base for advancing into Europe. We will grow it into a total cable company by adding the power cable business in the future," said the company's CEO Myung Roe-hyun.
LS Cable established a subsidiary for EV battery parts production in Poland, LS EV Poland (LSEVP), in November 2017. The subsidiary is planning to have an annual component production capacity for 300,000 electric cars and expand supply to European automakers, starting with LG Chem in Wrocław at the end of this year.
LS Cable also set up an optical cable production subsidiary, LS Cable & System Poland (LSCP), on the premise of LSEVP in February 2018 as the European optical cable market rapidly grew. It is the company’s third optical cable plant after one in Gumi in Korea and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.
LSCP has an annual production capacity of 3 million fiber kilometers, which accounts for about 7 percent of the European market. It has begun mass production from April and has been supplying the products to major network carriers in Europe, such as Italy and France.
With the completion of the Polish plant, LS Cable now has a total of 19 business operations at home and abroad, with nine of them based overseas, including Vietnam, China and the United States.