SK Innovation President Chung Chul-khil.

A crew works at SK Innovation’s EV battery production plant in Seosan, Chungcheongnam-do.

SK Innovation is turning to global partnership strategies aimed at implementing joint projects in collaboration with global players. 

SK Lubricants, a subsidiary of SK Innovation, established a joint venture with PT Pertamina, an Indonesian state-run oil company to set up a lubricant plant capable of producing 9,000 barrels of lubricants daily in Dumai, Indonesia. 

The joint venture is a win-win strategy of combining Pertamina’s supply of raw materials at cheaper prices, being extracted from Indonesia’s Minas crude oil, with SK’s world-class Lube Oil Plant Group III technology. 

In order to make a push into the European market, SK Lubricants set up ILBOC, a joint venture with Repsol, a European energy company, and built a lube base oil plant in Cartagena, Spain. 

The plant, capable of producing 13,300 barrels of lube oil daily, is jointly run by Repsol, is responsible for supplying raw materials of lube oil and infrastructure, and SK Lubricants, charged with lube base oil production technology and supplying its global marketing network. 

SK innovation has been implementing the Wuhan Ethylene Corporation project with China’s largest national oil company Sinopec. This mega joint project, with a construction price tag of 3.3 trillion won, will produce 2.5 million tons of petrochemical materials annually including ethylene from the naphtha cracking center (NCC), which was constructed by both companies in Wuhan, Hubei Province. The Wuhan plant will produce various petrochemical materials such as 800,000 TPY of ethylene, 600,000 TPY of PE, and 400,000 TPY of polypropylene (PP).

SK Innovation has established an EV battery joint venture with China's state-run Beijing Automotive Group and Beijing Electronics to make an inroad into the Chinese EV battery market. 

SK Innovation has teamed up with Mercedes-Benz to supply the carmaker with battery cells for its electric cars, which will come out in 2017.

SK Innovation posted 1.5 trillion won in operating profit in 2015, the largest one since 2011. SK Innovation saw net borrowing decline from 7.8 trillion won in 2014 to 3.5 trillion won in late last year thanks to unit cost reduction and disposing of non-essential assets. The company also saw its debt ratio drop from 119 percent in 2014 to 84 percent last year.

A view of SK Innovation’s EV battery production plant in Seosan. (Photos: SK Innovation)