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POSCO adds lithium business to portfolio for growth

2018/04/02 12:00
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SEOUL, April 2 (Yonhap) -- POSCO, the world's fifth-biggest steelmaker by output, has added lithium production to its business portfolio, the company said Monday.
This month, POSCO began making lithium hydroxide, a raw material that is used in the production of car batteries. It recently completed building a facility with an annual capacity of 1,500 tons of lithium hydroxide inside its steel mill in Gwangyang, about 420 kilometers southwest of Seoul, the company said in a statement. The move should help the steelmaker diversify its income sources.
"We have stepped-up efforts in the past eight years to produce and commercialize lithium hydroxide, as we see it as a new growth driver. We will continue to locally produce other core materials that have been imported by Korean firms," POSCO Chairman Kwon Oh-joon said in the statement.

This Yonhap News TV image shows POSCO Chairman Kwon Oh-joon delivering a welcoming speech at an event held in Pohang, about 370 km southeast of Seoul, home to the company's main steel plant, on April 1, 2018, to celebrate the firm's 50th anniversary. (Yonhap)
POSCO plans to sell lithium hydroxide to domestic battery makers, such as Samsung SDI Co. and LG Chem Ltd., which have been importing most of the material.
Unlike the lithium carbonate used in laptop and mobile phone batteries, lithium hydroxide is mainly used in manufacturing batteries for high-performance vehicles like Tesla Inc.'s electric cars.
In 2010, POSCO was the first company to develop the technology to directly extract lithium from used rechargeable batteries, sea water and lithium ore. It began to produce 1,000 tons of lithium carbonate per year at the Gwangyang steel plant in February 2017, it said.
As the sale of electric vehicles is on the rise, the steelmaker expects the global demand for lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide to jump to 710,000 tons in 2025 from around 250,000 tons in 2017.
In 2017, POSCO swung to a net profit of 2.974 trillion won from a net loss of 96.2 billion won a year earlier. It sold 35 million tons of steel products out of 37 million tons in output.
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