Samsung SDI Brand Guidelines: From 1970 Vacuum Tubes to the PRiMX Battery Brand

Vacuum tubes in 1970.

Samsung SDI is the battery and electronic-materials company of South Korea’s Samsung group, headquartered in Yongin, in Gyeonggi province. Its own history page dates its founding to January 1970, under the name Samsung-NEC, and records that it began producing vacuum tubes in July that year. English Wikipedia gives the same founding name and year.

For its first three decades it was a display company. The company says it developed a quick-start picture tube in 1975, exported black-and-white picture tubes in 1976, built a plant in Gumi in 1978 and passed 50 million cathode-ray tubes produced in 1987. Korean Wikipedia records the name changes: a new Korean name built on the word for electron tubes in 1974, Samsung Electron Device — the English form the company itself gives — in 1984, and Samsung SDI in December 1999. Korean Wikipedia says the letters stand for Samsung Display Interface.

Displays carried it into the new century. By its own account it developed Korea’s first liquid-crystal display in 1986 and Korea’s first plasma display in 1988; it says it became number one in global plasma-display market share in 2003 and began producing AMOLED screens in 2007. In 2008 it moved its AMOLED and mobile LCD business into a new company, Samsung Mobile Display, Korean Wikipedia says.

From picture tubes to battery cells.

Batteries arrived at the turn of the century. The company says it developed a cylindrical lithium-ion cell in October 1998 and held a completion ceremony for a rechargeable-cell plant in Cheonan in July 2000; Korean Wikipedia dates its entry into the lithium-ion business to 2000. In 2010, the company says, it became number one in global market share for small rechargeable batteries.

Cars followed through a partnership. In September 2008 Samsung SDI and the German company Bosch set up SB LiMotive, a joint venture for vehicle batteries; in 2012 Samsung SDI bought all of Bosch’s shares, and in 2013 it absorbed the company, according to its own history and Korean Wikipedia. In February 2015 it acquired the battery-pack business of Magna International. Its timeline records an EV battery plant in Xi’an, China, completed in 2015, and another in Hungary completed in May 2017. Customers named in that timeline include BMW, under a long-term supply contract signed in 2019, as well as the Volvo Group, Lucid Motors and, in 2023, Hyundai Motor Company.

The company has also changed shape. In July 2014 it merged with Cheil Industries, another Samsung affiliate, adding materials businesses, and in 2016 it split off its chemicals arm as SDI Chemical, Korean Wikipedia says. English Wikipedia describes two segments today: Energy Solutions, which makes rechargeable batteries for IT devices, cars and energy-storage systems, and Electronic Materials, which makes materials for semiconductors and displays.

Not every date in its history is product news. On 5 December 2012 the European Commission fined Samsung SDI, along with other manufacturers, for taking part in two cartels in cathode-ray tubes for televisions and for computer monitors; the Commission’s press release records that Samsung SDI received a reduction of its fine under the Commission’s leniency programme.

Design and documentation.

Battery makers sell mostly to other companies: carmakers, bus and truck builders, and the developers of grid storage. Few drivers ever see the name on the cells under the floor of their car, so these firms tend to build their public image around the product itself and the scale of the places where it is made, rather than around a consumer logo on a shop shelf.

The visual language that results is fairly consistent across the category. Press images often show a cell or pack in cutaway, with its layers, modules and cooling channels opened up like a technical drawing. Factory photographs favour long, white, brightly lit production halls, with workers in clean-room clothing beside automated lines. Product pages pair battery packs with renders of a bare electric-vehicle chassis, and storage products appear as rows of steel containers set out on open ground.

Trade fairs are where much of this imagery is first shown. Shows such as The Battery Show in North America and CIBF, the China International Battery Fair, gather cell makers, materials suppliers and equipment builders, and many makers time product names and launch films for those stands. Named product ranges, rather than model numbers alone, have become a common way for makers to give a cell chemistry or pack design a memorable identity.

The makers in this group are documented unevenly. Founding dates, stock listings, factory openings and major shareholders can usually be checked in public sources, while claims about chemistry, capacity and performance often rest only on the company’s own word. This guide keeps those two kinds of statement apart and attributes each claim to the source that makes it.

A group oval and the PRiMX name.

Samsung SDI uses the group identity. Its corporate-identity page shows the Samsung wordmark in a slightly tilted oval, which it says represents “the universe and global stage,” and explains that the open parts at the top left of the S and the bottom right of the G symbolise the flow of energy inside-out and back. The page specifies a single blue for the mark, given as Pantone 286C for print.

For batteries it has a name of its own. In December 2021, by its own timeline, it launched PRiMX as its official battery brand. In March 2025, it says, it began mass production of its next-generation 46-phi cylindrical batteries at the Cheonan factory, and in October 2025 it signed an agreement with BMW and Solid Power to validate all-solid-state batteries.

Its plants are spread across Korea and abroad. English Wikipedia says that as of October 2023 it ran two battery-cell plants in South Korea and four overseas, in the United States, China, Hungary and Malaysia. In North America it signed a joint venture with Stellantis in May 2022 and agreed one with General Motors in August 2024, according to its history. In August 2026 Samsung SDI bought GM’s entire 49.99 per cent stake in the SynergyCells plant under construction at New Carlisle, Indiana, WardsAuto reported on 12 August 2026, making it the company’s first wholly owned battery factory in North America; the company said it would use the plant to make batteries for stationary energy storage, and the two companies signed a new agreement to develop prismatic cells.

For a design guide, Samsung SDI shows how a company inside a large group keeps the group’s mark while giving its own product line a separate name. Compare LG, another Korean electronics group with a battery business, and SK On, a Korean battery maker. For this guide we use a deep blue, a steel grey and a pale silver with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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