To Build 3rd Plant with 30 GWh Annual Capacity
SK Battery Hungary (SKBH), SK Innovation’s subsidiary in Hungary, has made a turnaround by stabilizing its yield early.
SKBH racked up 690 million won in operating profit in 2020, a sharp turnaround from 19.5 billion won in loss a year ago, according to SK Innovation business report released on March 21.
During this period, SKBH’s sales swelled 210-fold from 1.7 billion won to 357.2 billion won. Its net loss shrank sharply from 17.3 billion won to 3.7 billion won.
SKBH's performance improvement is attributed to the fact that its first plant in Komarom, northern Hungary began to run in earnest in 2020. SKBH broke ground for the plant in 2018. The first plant was completed in the fourth quarter of 2019 and began volume-production in the first quarter of 2020. The construction of the second plant began in the first quarter of 2019 with mass-production scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2022. The first plant churns out 7.5 GWh of batteries per year, and the second plant’s capacity is 9.8 GWh.
At the beginning of 2021, SK Innovation also decided to establish a third plant with an annual production capacity of 30GWh in Iváncsa near Budapest, central Hungary. The company is expected to break ground for the third plant in the third quarter of 2021 at the earliest and invest a total of 2.6 trillion won sequentially by 2028.