Kwon Young-soo, vice chairman and CEO of LG Energy Solution / Courtesy of LG Energy Solution

By Baek Byung-yeul

Kwon Young-soo, vice chairman and CEO of LG Energy Solution, left for Europe to check the progress of establishing a smart factory system in its battery-manufacturing plant in Poland and to discuss ways to expand technological cooperation with clients there, the battery company said Sunday.

The company said the vice chairman will visit the company's plant in Wroclaw, Poland and had a meeting with officials from German tech company Siemens to talk about establishing smart factory systems.

"Vice Chairman Kwon plans to intensively check the progress of the smart factory system so that products that have the best quality and price competitiveness can be supplied to its customers during his business trip," a company spokesman said.

This is the vice chairman's first visit to Europe since he took the position in 2021. Early in May, he visited the company's battery plants in Michigan and Ohio in the United States to check how the plants are adopting the smart factory systems and to meet major clients such as General Motors.

In November 2021, LG Energy Solution signed a memorandum of understanding with Siemens to digitalize and consequently improve the production efficiency of its factories.

The Wroclaw factory is the world's largest battery-manufacturing plant with an annual production capacity of 70 gigawatts (GW) and the company's core production base for electric car battery demand in the European market.

To expand production capacity and improve production efficiency, LG Energy Solution has been establishing the smart factory system in the Polish plant.

In line with Kwon's visit to Europe, the battery company announced the restructuring of its organization so as to accelerate the establishment of smart factory systems in its global production sites and stabilize production in its plants in North America.

As part of the plan, the company established a production control department for the North American region under its automobile battery business division. The newly established department will be headed by Choi Suk-won, head of the company's Polish unit.

The new department will also have an organization in charge of production support to establish smart factory systems and perform tasks for the early stabilization of the production quality.

"We will further step up efforts to build a smart factory at global production sites and try to establish a system so that our units across the world can operate like one factory through a standardized production process," Kwon said in a statement.

The LG Energy Solutions vice chairman said, "We will further step up efforts to build a smart factory at global production sites and try to establish a system in which corporations around the world operate like one factory through a standardized production process."

"By doing so, we will provide customers with the highest level of QCD (quality, cost and delivery) and become the No. 1 profitable company that customers trust and love," the vice chairman added.