KEPCO Brand Guidelines: Hanseong Electric of 1898, a 1961 Merger & the Barakah Reactors

Trams, street lamps and a palace investor.

KEPCO, in full Korea Electric Power Corporation and known in Korean as Hanjeon, is South Korea’s national electricity utility. English Wikipedia says the government owns 51.10 per cent of it, directly and indirectly, and that through its subsidiaries it accounted for 96 per cent of Korea’s generation in 2023. Its head office is in Naju, South Jeolla; it moved there from Samseong-dong in Seoul in 2014, in August according to English Wikipedia and in December according to the company’s own timeline.

KEPCO dates itself to 1898 — its timeline says it formally re-established that as its founding year in December 2012. In January 1898 Hanseong Electric Company was set up in Seoul; KEPCO calls it Korea’s first power company. Korean Wikipedia says the imperial household put up cash and land, and that a permit for electric lighting, trams and telephones was issued on 18 January 1898 to a syndicate led by the Americans Henry Collbran and Harry Rice Bostwick. The first tram line opened in 1899 — in March, says KEPCO; on 8 April, says Korean Wikipedia — and in April 1900 the first private lighting was switched on in Jongno. In July 1904 the business passed to the American Korean Electric Company, formed under Connecticut law.

Japanese companies then moved in. KEPCO’s timeline lists the founding of the Ilhan (Japan–Korea) Gas Company in September 1908, and Korean Wikipedia says that in 1909 it bought American Korean Electric’s business and became Japan–Korea Gas and Electric. KEPCO marks August 1910, the start of Japanese rule, as the point when Japanese capital entered the peninsula’s power industry in full. The firm was renamed Gyeongseong Electric in September 1915; in April 1917 Kaeseong Electric was founded, which KEPCO calls the first electric company financed by Korean capital.

In December 1931 the Governor-General announced a plan to fold 54 distribution companies into four within five years. Namseon Combined Electric followed in March 1937, and in February 1943 Joseon Jeonup was formed by merging three generation and transmission companies, a month before an electric power control ordinance, KEPCO says. The Supung hydroelectric plant, of 600,000 kW, was completed in 1944, according to both Wikipedias. The sources used for this guide do not say more about these companies’ operations during the Second World War, or whether forced or conscripted labour was used on their plants and dam projects in those years.

A merger, a listing and a reactor export.

In September 1945 the electricity businesses of Joseon Jeonup, Gyeongseong Electric and Namseon Electric were transferred from Japanese control, KEPCO’s timeline says. Supply from the north stopped in May 1948, and the Korean War damaged plant from 1950. On 1 July 1961 the three companies were merged into the Korea Electric Company, which English Wikipedia says became wholly government-owned and took its present name, Korea Electric Power Corporation, in January 1982. KEPCO says restrictions on transmission were fully lifted in April 1964 for the first time since 1945, and that unit 1 of the Gori (Kori) nuclear plant was completed in July 1978.

KEPCO’s shares were sold to the public in August 1989 as a “national stock,” the second after POSCO’s, and in October 1994 it became the second Korean company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the company says. In April 2001, under the restructuring of the power industry, its generation business was split into six subsidiaries: Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, which runs nuclear and hydro plants, and five thermal generators, English Wikipedia says. KEPCO itself kept transmission, distribution and sales. Overseas work grew from the Malaya plant in the Philippines, whose operation it won in 1995, to the Ilijan combined-cycle plant, completed there in 2002.

KEPCO calls its first nuclear plant export the one of December 2009. Arab News reported on 28 December 2009 that the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation had awarded a KEPCO-led consortium the contract to build four 1,400 MW reactors at a site about 330 km west of Abu Dhabi, the plant now called Barakah. The consortium included Samsung, Hyundai and Doosan Heavy Industries, the US firm Westinghouse, Toshiba of Japan and KEPCO subsidiaries; rival bidders included Areva and a General Electric and Hitachi group. KEPCO says it installed the first reactor in May 2014, and unit 4 began commercial operation in September 2024.

The project has also led to a dispute inside the group. Asia Economy reported in June 2026 that Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power had filed for arbitration against KEPCO on 21 May 2026 at the international arbitration centre of the Korean Commercial Arbitration Board, over an operation support services contract for Barakah, after both sides withdrew an earlier case at the London Court of International Arbitration.

Utilities in public.

Electricity utilities in Asia rarely sell a product people can hold, so their public image is built from places and services. The most common picture is the city at night: a skyline of lit towers seen across a harbour, offered as proof that the supply works. Out of town the pictures change to substations, transmission pylons striding over paddy fields and hills, and power stations set on coasts and islands.

Much of the visible design work now sits on screens. Customer-service apps and web pages handle accounts, bills, payments and outage notices, and many utilities also run electric-vehicle charging services and reward schemes inside the same apps. The bill itself is a design object: a page of tariffs, fuel charges and usage graphs that households read every billing period.

Campaigns are the other public face. Energy-saving drives, school programmes and community events give a utility a friendlier voice than its engineering does, and they often carry the brand into kitchens, classrooms and housing estates. Alongside them sit transition plans, with dates for running down coal-fired units, adding gas, wind or solar capacity and reaching longer-term climate targets, usually presented as timelines and charts.

The most complete record of how these companies see themselves is often the annual report. For listed and state-owned utilities alike it gathers the plants, the networks, the customer numbers and the plans in one document, with photography and typography chosen to match. The guides in this group look at the history behind each name, and at how that history shows up in the way the company presents itself today.

A symbol mark, a letter mark, red and royal blue.

KEPCO sets out its identity on its own website. The corporate identity page offers four elements — a symbol mark, a logotype, a letter mark and a horizontal signature combining them — and names two colours: a main colour, KEPCO Red, and a secondary one, KEPCO Royal Blue. The company publishes these for download; nothing from them is reproduced here, and the tones in this guide are our own.

Two names run side by side: in English the company is KEPCO, and in Korean it is commonly shortened to Hanjeon. Since 2015 the company has also put its name on BIXPO, the Bitgaram International Exposition of Electric Power Technology, named after the innovation city around its Naju head office; it held the first in October 2015. At BIXPO 2026, on 4 November at the Kimdaejung Convention Center in Gwangju, chief executive Kim Dong-cheol, appointed in September 2023, briefed reporters on electricity rates and grid investment, the Seoul Economic Daily reported.

KEPCO says it ranked first among utilities in the Forbes Global 2000 in May 2016, and Korean Wikipedia says that in January 2024 it registered as a telecommunications operator, widening its business beyond electricity. Its subsidiaries — the generators, along with engineering, plant-service, nuclear-fuel and data companies — sit on its website as a family of sites.

For a design guide, KEPCO shows how a national utility can carry a long corporate lineage, from a Seoul tram company to an exporter of reactors, under a compact letter-mark identity in two fixed colours. Compare Taipower, Taiwan’s state utility with a 1919 predecessor, and TNB. For this guide we use a grid blue, an ember red and porcelain with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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