[Asia Economy Reporter So-yeon Park] LG Chem was ranked 10th in the '2018 Global Top 50 Chemical Companies' list selected by C&EN, a professional magazine published by the American Chemical Society (ACS) last year.
As a leading chemical company representing Korea, LG Chem plans to achieve sales of 59 trillion KRW in 2024, double the current sales of about 30 trillion KRW, and surpass double-digit operating profit margins to leap into the 'Global Top 5 Chemical Companies.' In particular, this year has been declared 'The Year of Execution,' with plans to strengthen market- and customer-centric portfolios and establish performance-driven R&D innovation.
In the petrochemical sector, the strategy is to fundamentally enhance the product structure centered on technology-differentiated businesses while strengthening overseas partnerships by region to become a global player beyond the Northeast Asia region. LG Chem plans to invest a total of 2.6 trillion KRW to expand the Yeosu NCC (Naphtha Cracking Center) and high value-added polyolefin (PO) by 800,000 tons each and start mass production by the second half of 2021 to expand technology-differentiated products and internalize basic raw materials. Additionally, the company has set a goal to increase the sales ratio of next-generation products such as elastomers and metallocene-based high value-added PO to about 20% of the total by 2022.
Along with this, LG Chem plans to actively seek cooperation with various partners by region to secure differentiated capabilities and preoccupy global growth markets such as India, Southeast Asia, and China.
In the battery sector, LG Chem aims to enhance production and quality capabilities including price competitiveness and continuously discover various business models suited to market conditions to strengthen its market-leading position. In particular, the strategy is to aggressively pursue large projects centered on the 3rd generation electric vehicles (over 500 km) in the automotive battery business to firmly maintain the number one position. By the end of this year, battery production capacity is planned to expand to 1.7 million units (100 GWh) based on high-performance pure electric vehicles.
An LG Chem official said, "Through cooperation with domestic and overseas automakers, we will continuously secure global business operation capabilities and focus on expanding the technology gap with latecomers by establishing differentiated entry barriers in the battery business."
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