POSCO Future M Brand Guidelines: Pohang Refractories to Cathodes and Anodes

A refractories maker and a furnace-lining firm.

POSCO Future M is the battery-materials company of South Korea’s POSCO Group, based in Pohang, the steel city on the country’s south-east coast. The company’s own history begins in January 1963 with Samhwa Hwaseong, a maker of basic refractories, the heat-resistant materials that line steel furnaces, and the company describes itself as the oldest firm in the POSCO Group. A second branch began in May 1971 with Pohang Chukro, a POSCO subsidiary that maintained and relined industrial furnaces; in 1973 it was designated a repair partner for POSCO’s furnaces. The company counts its age from that 1971 start: it marked its 50th anniversary in April 2021, and The Asia Business Daily, reporting in February 2023, gave its founding year as 1971.

The two branches came together in December 1994, when Samhwa Hwaseong merged with the furnace business, by then called Geoyang Ro Gongeop, under the name Pocheol Rojae. The company says the merger made it a refractories specialist that could both manufacture furnace linings and install them. In April 2001 it took the name POSREC, and in October that year its shares were listed on KOSDAQ, the Korean market for growth companies. In 2008 it began operating lime-calcining plants at POSCO’s Pohang and Gwangyang steelworks, producing quicklime, a raw material of steelmaking.

In March 2010 the company was renamed POSCO Chemtech. That year it began operating the coal-chemical plant at POSCO’s Gwangyang steelworks, which uses gas from the coke ovens, and acquired an anode-materials business, the step that took it into lithium-ion batteries. Its first plant for battery anode material was completed in November 2011, and the company records its first commercial production of needle coke, a carbon material, in October 2015. The company says it uses needle coke and pitch coke in electric-vehicle batteries and in the electric furnaces used to make steel.

From POSCO Chemical to POSCO Future M.

Batteries then reshaped the company. In March 2019 it became POSCO Chemical, and in April it merged with POSCO ESM, bringing the group’s energy-materials operations under one roof; the company dates its entry into cathode materials to 2018. In May 2019 its listing moved from KOSDAQ to the main KOSPI market. The first phase of a cathode plant at Gwangyang was completed in July 2019, and the plant was completed in full, with its third and fourth phases, in November 2022. An artificial-graphite anode plant in Pohang followed in December 2021.

A lithium-ion cell needs two active materials: a cathode, the positive electrode, and an anode, the negative electrode, usually made from graphite. POSCO Future M says it is the only company in Korea that produces both. It also says it has the technology to make artificial graphite from pitch coke, which is processed from by-products of steelmaking, and that sister companies in the POSCO Group specialising in lithium and nickel give it what it calls a full value chain for battery raw materials. Its history records an order for high-nickel cathode material from Samsung SDI in January 2023.

The company also looked abroad. In December 2021 it and General Motors announced plans for a joint cathode-materials venture in North America, and in May 2022 the venture, Ultium CAM, was launched, the company’s history records. The company says it continues to build cathode and anode production in Pohang, Gwangyang and Sejong in Korea, and in China and North America.

The present name came in 2023. On 24 February the board approved a proposal to rename POSCO Chemical as POSCO FUTURE M, The Asia Business Daily reported, with the change to be confirmed at the annual shareholders’ meeting on 20 March 2023; on that day the company held a ceremony to proclaim the new name. The M, the paper reported, stands at once for Future, Materials, Move and Manager, and the new name followed the launch of a POSCO Group holding company in 2022, as the group set out to become what it called an eco-friendly future-materials group. English Wikipedia also dates the change from POSCO Chemical to March 2023.

Design and documentation.

Lithium and battery-materials companies sell to other companies, not to shoppers, and their imagery is built for investors, carmakers and governments as much as for the public. Most of it starts at the source. Brine producers show their evaporation ponds from the air: long rectangles of turquoise, green and pale yellow laid out across a white salt flat, with mountains on the horizon. Hard-rock miners show open pits cut in terraces into red or ochre earth, haul trucks on the benches and stockpiles of pale spodumene ore.

The next layer is chemistry. Company photographs move indoors to white lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide powders held in gloved hands or poured from a scoop, bulk bags stacked in a warehouse, and the long kilns and furnaces of refineries and cathode-material plants. These images carry the industry’s main argument: that a mineral dug or pumped in one country becomes a battery-grade chemical in another.

The end use usually appears last, and it is almost always the same: battery cells, electric cars, charging cables and grid-scale storage containers. The pictures show where the material is meant to go.

Much of the visual language is corporate rather than consumer. Investor-day slides and annual reports lean on world maps dotted with mines, plants and offices, flow charts of the supply chain from resource to cathode, and the logos of listing exchanges. Industry gatherings such as Fastmarkets’ Lithium Supply and Battery Raw Materials conference bring producers, refiners and buyers into the same rooms, and the same maps and pond photographs reappear on stage. In a sector where few people see the product, the identity rests on landscapes, laboratories and the cars at the end of the chain.

A group blue and a steel-city past.

The older businesses did not disappear. English Wikipedia describes POSCO Future M as making refractories and quicklime as well as battery materials, and the company groups its work into three areas: battery materials, advanced chemical materials and basic industrial materials. The chemical side includes coal chemicals made from coke-oven gas, needle coke and pitch coke, and hydrogen peroxide from P&O Chemical, a subsidiary set up in 2020 whose hydrogen-peroxide plant was completed in October 2022. The Asia Business Daily reported in 2023 that the company supplies hydrogen peroxide to the semiconductor and display industries and also makes activated carbon for water and air purification.

The company’s look comes from its group. On its website POSCO Future M presents the POSCO Group corporate identity, in which the five letters of POSCO are balanced around the central S; the group says the arrangement stands for harmony, unity and trust. The mark is set in a deep blue the group calls POSCO Blue, and the company publishes Korean and English versions of its own POSCO FUTURE M signature. In its own materials the name is usually written in capitals.

Through all of this the company has stayed in Pohang. Its names, from Samhwa Hwaseong and Pohang Chukro to Pocheol Rojae, POSREC, POSCO Chemtech, POSCO Chemical and now POSCO Future M, follow its work from furnace linings and quicklime to the active materials inside battery cells, and since 2010 every one of them has carried the POSCO name.

For a design guide, POSCO Future M shows how a shared group identity can carry a subsidiary through several names and a change of industry. Compare POSCO, the steel parent whose works the company grew up serving, and EcoPro, another Korean battery-materials maker. For this guide we use a deep blue, a teal and a pale grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep POSCO Future M’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.