Lotte Chemical Brand Guidelines: Honam Petrochemical 1976, a 2012 Rename & H&L Advanced

A 1976 Yeosu venture that Lotte bought in 1979.

Lotte Chemical began as Honam Petrochemical, founded on 16 March 1976, according to the company’s website. Korean Wikipedia describes the new company as a 50:50 investment by Yeosu Petrochemical, a state-owned company, and Japan’s Mitsui Petrochemical; the company’s own timeline records technology agreements in April 1976 with Mitsui Petrochemical, Mitsui Toatsu Chemicals and a British Shell development company. Its first polypropylene, polyethylene and ethylene oxide glycol plants at the Yeosu complex were completed in March 1979.

The company passed into private hands the same year. In June 1979 the Lotte Group took it over as the state sold its holding, the company’s timeline says; Korean Wikipedia adds that Lotte bought the stake held by Yeosu Petrochemical and that commercial production of polyethylene and polypropylene began that December. Honam Petrochemical listed its shares in May 1991 and started commercial operation of its own naphtha cracker and aromatics plant in May 1992.

Growth came largely by acquisition. In June 2003 Honam bought the second complex of the former Hyundai Petrochemical at Daesan, in a consortium with LG Chem; in November 2004 it bought KP Chemical; and in July 2010 it bought Malaysia’s Titan Chemicals, which became Lotte Chemical Titan and listed on the Malaysian stock exchange in July 2017. In December 2012 Honam absorbed KP Chemical and took the name Lotte Chemical, according to the company and to Korean Wikipedia, which cites the trade paper E2News.

Samsung chemicals, a US cracker and a Daesan merger.

The next round of growth came from Samsung. Lotte Chemical bought the Samsung group’s chemical affiliates, completing the deal in May 2016, the company’s timeline says; they became Lotte Fine Chemical and Lotte Advanced Materials, which Lotte Chemical merged into itself in January 2020. In May 2019 it completed an ethane cracker and an ethylene glycol plant in the United States, and in March 2023 it bought Iljin Materials, renamed Lotte Energy Materials. Its timeline lists the launch of Lotte Engineering Plastics in September 2024 and the completion of the LINE project in Indonesia in November 2025.

Today the company describes five businesses: basic chemicals, from synthetic resins and rubber to base chemicals; advanced materials for mobility, building interiors and electronics; battery materials; hydrogen energy; and fine chemicals. It says its products reach everyday goods, mobility, IT, home appliances, medical and building uses. Korean Wikipedia describes its core output as aromatics such as benzene, toluene and xylene, and the synthetic resins, synthetic-fibre raw materials and synthetic rubber made from those base chemicals. Its head office occupies floors 14 to 16 of the Lotte World Tower in Seoul, where Korean Wikipedia says it moved in June 2017.

Since late 2025 Lotte Chemical has been at the centre of a government-backed restructuring of Korea’s naphtha crackers. It spun off its Daesan plant as Lotte Daesan Petrochemical in June 2026. Korea’s Fair Trade Commission approved, with conditions, its merger into HD Hyundai Chemical on 20 August 2026, The Herald Business reported, and on 1 September 2026 the merged company was renamed H&L Advanced, owned 50:50 by Lotte Chemical and HD Hyundai Oilbank, the Seoul Economic Daily reported. Businesskorea said the plan calls for the Daesan cracker, with an annual capacity of 1.1 million tons, to stop operating over three years. At Yeosu, Lotte Chemical aims to launch an integrated company with Yeochun NCC in the first half of 2027 after a spin-off, The Asia Business Daily reported on 6 November 2026; that plan was not completed at the time of writing.

Design and documentation.

Petrochemical makers sell materials most people never see on their own: ethylene and propylene, and the pellets of polyethylene, polypropylene and PVC that other companies turn into film, bottles, pipes and car parts. With no product on a shop shelf, the company name has to do most of the work, and many of these firms present it as a bold corporate wordmark, often in capitals or a heavy sans, set on plain white pages.

Colour tends to be cool and sober. Blues and greens recur across the trade’s websites and reports, and pictures lean on the plants themselves: crackers, columns and pipe racks photographed at dusk, lit against a dark sky, or tanker ships and rail terminals at the edge of a port. The plant is the product, so the plant becomes the image.

The websites follow a shared structure. Product pages are usually organised by polymer family — polyethylene, polypropylene, PVC and the rest — with grades, process technologies and trademarked range names, and with applications grouped by market: packaging, cars and construction are the usual first three. Many makers now give equal space to circularity and recycling, with pages for recycled or renewable-based ranges and chemical recycling projects, and publish annual safety, sustainability and community reports as part of the same identity.

The makers in this guide share that vocabulary but come from different histories: mergers of older companies, buyouts of single plants, joint ventures between oil groups and family conglomerates. This guide sets out who founded each one, who owns it and how its name came about, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A group symbol, three motifs and a green leaf.

Like LG Chem, Lotte Chemical builds on a group mark. Its website describes its signature as the Lotte Group symbol mark combined with a logotype of the company’s official name. The symbol, it says, carries the group vision of “Lifetime Value Creator” and may not be used alone, and the logotype may not be altered. The logo’s main colours are LOTTE Red, LOTTE Chemical Blue and LOTTE Chemical Green, with gray and silver allowed for special uses. The company writes its own name with the group name in capitals, as LOTTE Chemical.

The visual identity adds three motifs drawn from the logo, matching three brand values. People Oriented is a rounded diamond line, which the company links to the base of the Lotte World Tower, the shape behind the group symbol; Forward Thinking is a circle taken from the dot of the L line, shown in the signature blue; and Life Enriching is a green leaf that grows from a line into a filled shape. The vision reads “We Lead Every Step for a Greener and Better Tomorrow,” and the Korean slogan speaks of a step ahead toward a greener world. Its eco brand, ECOSEED, launched in September 2023, has a brand book of its own.

For a design guide, Lotte Chemical shows how a group palette can be stretched with a sector colour, here a green, to carry a sustainability message. Compare LG Chem, its partner in the 2003 Daesan purchase, and SK Innovation, another Korean group’s energy and chemicals arm. For this guide we use a brick red, a deep navy and a leaf green on stone grays with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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