South Korean graphene enterprise Graphene Square recently announced that its graphene film mass production plant located in the Blue Valley National Industrial Complex, Pohang City, Gyeongsangbuk-do, has been officially completed and entered the operation phase. This is South Korea's first important attempt to systematically explore the continuous production of large-area graphene films relying on factory-scale facilities, and is also regarded as a key node in the layout of the local new material industry.
Public data shows that Graphene Square was established in 2012 and has long focused on the preparation and application of high-quality graphene films. In 2021, the company signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on investment with the Gyeongsangbuk-do government and Pohang City, and subsequently moved its headquarters from Suwon to Pohang to promote the simultaneous implementation of production capacity and technology around the industrialization of graphene materials. The newly completed Pohang plant has a total investment of approximately 42 billion won and a total construction area of about 6,308 square meters, making it the company's largest and most automated production base to date. At the capital level, Graphene Square completed a 19 billion won Series B financing in 2023 and obtained 16 billion won in pre-IPO financing in April this year, providing financial support for equipment investment and operational ramp-up during the mass production phase.
In terms of technical routes, the core competitiveness of the Pohang plant lies in its large-area and continuous production capacity. Based on its independently developed Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) graphene preparation process, Graphene Square has built a large-scale production system for industrial applications, breaking through the previous preparation mode mainly based on laboratories or pilot-scale tests. The company stated that compared with the pilot phase, the unit manufacturing cost of the new plant has decreased significantly, mainly due to the dilution of fixed costs after the expansion of production scale, the improvement of equipment utilization rate brought about by the transformation of production mode from batch operation to continuous operation, and the gradual automation of logistics, handling, testing and other links, thereby reducing comprehensive manufacturing costs.
However, Graphene Square also pointed out that there is still a time lag between the decline in manufacturing costs and the actual selling price perceived by customers in the market. In the initial stage of mass production, downstream customers usually need to invest more resources in quality certification, testing and screening, and related costs will to a certain extent weaken the price advantage in the short term; at the same time, if the initial order scale is limited and the production capacity utilization rate is insufficient, cost savings will be difficult to quickly transmit to terminal prices. The company expects that as price barriers gradually decrease, more customers will enter the verification and introduction stage, and sales growth is expected to drive the simultaneous improvement of yield and production capacity utilization rate, thereby promoting further cost reduction and forming a positive cycle centered on large-scale applications.
According to the plan, after the Pohang plant reaches full production capacity, its annual graphene film production capacity will reach 300,000 square meters. In the next three to four months, the plant will focus on the introduction and installation of key equipment, followed by a three to four-month phase of ramping up production yield and process stability. Considering the quality verification cycle of downstream customers, the company expects to gradually start mass delivery to the market between the end of next year and the beginning of 2027. The industry generally believes that the progress of this project will to a certain extent provide a new industrialization sample for graphene films to move from R&D to large-scale applications.
Source: Carbontech
