SK On Brand Guidelines: SK Innovation’s Battery Arm, Spun Off in Seoul in 2021

A battery programme inside an oil refiner.

SK On is young as a company and old as a project. It was created on 1 October 2021, when SK Innovation, the energy and chemicals arm of South Korea’s SK Group, spun off its battery business as a wholly owned subsidiary, InsideEVs reported that month. The plan had been announced in August and was approved at an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting in September with 80.2 per cent of the vote. On the same day SK Innovation also spun off its oil exploration business as SK Earthon, the parent’s own history page says. The first chief executive was Jee Dong-seob, and the company explained the name as a double meaning: “turning on” and “going on.”

The parent has a long lineage of its own. SK Innovation’s history page traces it to the Korea Petroleum Corporation, launched in 1962, which Sunkyong Group, now SK Group, acquired in 1980; it was renamed Yukong in 1982, SK Corporation in 1997, SK Energy in 2007 and SK Innovation in 2011.

Batteries came out of that refining business. SK On says the group announced plans for an energy storage battery system in 1982, set up a technical research laboratory in 1985 and in 1992 was chosen to lead a national electric-vehicle battery project working on sodium-sulphur cells. It says lithium-ion development began in 1996, that work on batteries for hybrid cars started in 2005, and that a medium-to-large automotive lithium-ion battery followed in 2006. Development of a battery for fully electric cars began in 2009, the company says, and the first mass-production line at Seosan, in South Chungcheong province, was built in 2012; SK Innovation dates the completion of the Seosan battery plant to September 2012.

Kia, Mercedes-AMG and high-nickel cells.

SK On describes its products in four layers — cells, modules, packs and battery management systems — for fully electric, plug-in hybrid and hybrid cars, and English Wikipedia adds energy storage systems. Its early customers, the company says, included Kia’s Ray, the Mercedes-AMG SLS AMG E-Cell, for which it was chosen as supplier in 2011, and the Kia Soul EV, sold from 2014. It also says it won a large order from Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz in early 2016.

China came early. In 2013 the company formed BESK, a joint venture with the BAIC Group and Beijing Electronics Holding, to supply batteries for electric taxis in Beijing, SK On says; its site still lists BESK in Beijing and a BESK subsidiary in Changzhou.

The technical story the company tells is about nickel. SK On says it mass-produced an NCM622 battery, named for its ratio of nickel, cobalt and manganese, in 2014, and that this was the first time such a cell was supplied to electric vehicles anywhere; it lists the NCM811 in 2018 and a cell it calls NCM9½½ in 2022. It also describes a “Z-folding” method of stacking cathodes and anodes between separators in a zigzag, which it says it owns exclusively, and a dual-layer electrode coating. These are the company’s own descriptions.

Since the spin-off, English Wikipedia lists new customers: a supply contract with Nissan in March 2025, and selection in April 2025 as battery supplier to Slate. In September 2025, it says, SK On completed an all-solid-state battery plant in Daejeon, where the company has its research institute; Korean Wikipedia calls it a pilot plant.

How battery makers show themselves.

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.

Plants on three continents, and a settled dispute.

SK On’s factories are spread across the main car markets. Beyond Seosan, its own site lists two plants at Komárom and a third at Iváncsa in Hungary; SK Innovation dates mass production at Komárom, its first standalone plant in Europe, to January 2020. In China the company lists sites at Yancheng, Changzhou and, in a joint venture with EVE Energy, Huizhou; English Wikipedia says that in November 2025 SK On swapped stakes in its two joint ventures with Eve Power and took full ownership of the Jiangsu site.

In the United States the first plant is at Commerce, Georgia, where construction began in 2019 and mass production started in January 2022, according to SK Innovation; English Wikipedia says it supplies Volkswagen and Hyundai. A joint venture with Hyundai near Cartersville, Georgia, was announced in December 2022. With Ford, SK On formed BlueOval SK, building plants in Kentucky and Tennessee; in December 2025 the two companies announced the joint venture’s dissolution, with SK On taking the Tennessee facility, English Wikipedia says.

The Georgia plant was at the centre of a legal dispute before SK On existed. On 10 February 2021 the US International Trade Commission issued a ten-year import ban on SK Innovation’s batteries in a trade-secret case brought by LG Energy Solution, basing it on what the commission called an “extraordinary” effort by SK Innovation to destroy evidence, Bloomberg reported in a story carried by Al Jazeera on 12 April 2021. The ITC had allowed time to import components for batteries assembled in Georgia for Ford and Volkswagen. The two companies settled in April 2021, averting the ban, withdrawing all lawsuits in Korea and abroad and agreeing not to sue each other for ten years.

SK On has since grown beyond batteries. SK Trading International merged into it in November 2024, SK Enterm, a tank-terminal operator, in February 2025, and the lubricant maker SK Enmove in November 2025, according to SK Innovation and English Wikipedia. SK On is headquartered in Jongno-gu, Seoul, and remains a subsidiary of SK Innovation.

For a design guide, SK On shows how a battery business can carry a group name while building an identity of its own. Compare Samsung SDI, another Korean cell maker, and LG, whose battery company was on the other side of the 2021 dispute. For this guide we use ember red, amber and graphite with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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