SK Chemical Achieves Record High Performance in Specialty Chemicals... Operating Profit Up 30%

Strong Performance in Specialty Copolyester Business
Growth Driven by Expanded Sales of High-Heat-Resistant, High-Transparency Ecozen

SK Chemicals recorded its highest-ever performance last year, thanks to the strong specialty segment.

SK Chemicals announced on the 7th that its standalone sales, excluding subsidiaries, reached 1.3405 trillion KRW, with an operating profit of 111.1 billion KRW last year. This is the best performance since SK Discovery was launched in 2017 and split into a business company. Compared to the previous year, sales increased by 8.7% and operating profit rose by 30.0%.

SK Chemicals attributed its strong performance amid the economic downturn and chemical industry slump to its specialty material, copolyester. Last year, the company developed new applications in the copolyester field to expand its customer base and increased sales of ECOZEN, a specialized material mainly used in areas requiring high heat resistance and transparency, which drove the performance growth.

Copolyester is a specialty material with transparency and high functionality, continuously expanding its use in various fields such as food containers, cosmetics, and electronic products. However, it is known as a material commercialized by only a few companies so far.

Kang Seok-ho, Head of Management Support Division at SK Chemicals, said, "SK Chemicals’ continuous innovation, reorganizing its business over a long period by streamlining general-purpose materials and non-core businesses and focusing on specialties like copolyester, led to performance growth despite the downturn. We plan to diversify the copolyester product lineup through continuous product and technology innovation and build a circular recycling material business as another specialty pipeline."

Meanwhile, the consolidated performance including subsidiaries such as SK Bioscience recorded sales of 1.7355 trillion KRW and an operating loss of 44.8 billion KRW last year. In the fourth quarter of last year, on a consolidated basis, sales were 514.3 billion KRW with an operating loss of 28.5 billion KRW.