The business South Korean ILJIN Materialsmanufacturer of battery componentswill open a factory in Mont Roig del Camp (Baix Camp, Tarragona) that will employ 500 people. It’s about your first floor from production to Europewith an investment of 600 million of euros. The ‘conseller’ d’Empresa i Treball, Roger Torrentannounced this Monday after meeting in the capital of South Korea, seoulwith company directors.
Torrent has highlighted the importance of agreement, since ILJIN is “one of the only companies in the world” dedicated to the manufacture of copper sheets for electric vehicle batteries and electronic products.
Operational from 2024
The forecast is that it will be operational from 2024 with an area of 30,000 square meters between the factory, the warehouse areas and a technical building. ILJIN Materialsfounded in 1968 and headquartered in seoulcurrently has 1,100 workers on an international scale. Since its foundation, it only had one production plant Iksan (South Korea), but a few years ago he built a new factory in malaysia. The company has clients such as LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, Volkswagen or Northvolt, among others.
The company is engaged in the manufacture of electrofoil producta copper sheet – patented by the multinational – which is finer than a human hair and is a staple for lithium batteries. According to the Government, this fact makes ILJIN’s investment “strategic and with high added value” for Catalonia, since it is a “key” by the composition of the cathode of electric batteries used in electric vehicles and in energy storage applications.
Multiplier effect
In fact, this investment is expected to have a strong multiplier effect for local suppliers, as has happened in Malaysiaand the attraction of new foreign investment projects linked to this area.
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The project, a greenfield investment (that is, a company that had no previous presence in the country) has been managed by the teams in Barcelona and the Seoul office of Acció – the agency for the competitiveness of the Generalitat-, in collaboration with the city council of the municipality of Mont-roig del Camp.
A year of negotiations
The office identified the company’s interest in expanding to Europe and has worked in the last year for it to materialize. It’s about the highest industrial investment of this type in the last 20 years in Catalonia. In fact, this 2022 marks 10 years since Acció opened the office in the South Korean capital.