Vice Chairman Park Jin-soo of LChem.

LG Chem had the greatest quarter in its history in terms of sales in the first quarter this year, rising to 6.553,6 trillion won, up 66.9 billion won YoY, the company said on April 30.
President Chung Ho-young and Chief Financial Officer attributed the outstanding performance to swift sales of electric batteries and the surprising performance of Farm Hanong, a life-science affiliate of the group, among others. However, its operating profit fell 18.3 percent YoY at 650.8 billion won due mainly to a strong Korean currency, boosting the price of raw materials, the CFO said.
Chung said the company should do very well in the second quarter with the arrival of the peak season for the company’s major products, although uncertain factors such as foreign exchange rates and the price of oil still remain. The company built an EV battery plant in Holland, Michigan, in the United States at the cost of $330 million in 2015.
Two of the three assembly lines operate 24 hours a day, and the plant is adding a fourth production line for an as-yet-unnamed customer. The plant also is expected to produce batteries for GM's next electric car, the Chevrolet Bolt, although LG Chem has not yet confirmed that.
LG Chem appears likely to beat Tesla to the punch as the operator of North America's first battery “gigafactory,” the name Tesla has given to the giant battery plant it is building in Nevada.
Tesla's plant has drawn headlines, but LG Chem quietly has positioned its Holland plant to be a formidable competitor and possibly the market leader. Navigant, a research firm based in Chicago, estimates the LG Chem factory could account for as much as one quarter of North America's total EV battery capacity.
The plant produces 650 megawatt-hours worth of battery cells annually, according to Navigant ― a production rate that could rise to 3 gigawatt-hours within a couple of years. If so, the Holland plant will be North America's biggest EV battery plant.
According to Nick Kassanos, president of LG Chem Michigan Inc., the Holland facility generates just two defects per million battery cells, evidence that the equipment has successfully gone through the debugging phase. And as customer orders grow, “there is room to expand without adding brick and mortar,” Kassanos said.
With a scalable production system, LG Chem can expand without risk of leaving costly equipment underused.
“That equipment is very expensive, but they can put in exactly as much capacity as they need,” said Sam Abuelsamid, a Detroit-based researcher for Navigant. “They don't have equipment sitting idle.”
LG must compete for EV battery contracts with Japanese rivals Panasonic Corp. and NEC Corp. And Tesla's $5 billion battery plant in Nevada is expected to launch production next year.
But LG Chem appears to be gaining market share. The Holland plant produces battery cells for the Volt, Chevrolet Spark EV and Cadillac ELR, according to Abuelsamid. The facility soon will launch production of cells for the Cadillac CT6 plug-in hybrid, and it likely will supply batteries for the Chevrolet Bolt next year. More contracts appear to be on the way. In April, LG Chem announced it would hire more workers to produce batteries for a new, unidentified customer starting late this year.

An Aerial Shot of LG Chem’s EV battery plant in Holland, Michigan, the United States. (Photos: LG Chem)