Cultural differences have slowed European expansion, says LG Energy

SOUTH Korean battery maker LG Energy Solution has taken longer to ramp up production at its plant in Poland, partly because of a difference in approach by local workers, its chief technology officer said.

“The ownership of workers in Poland, a European country, is not as high as that of Korean employees at factories,” Shin Youngjoon said at the Korea Investment Week conference in Seoul on Monday (Sep 11). “They are not good at handling something that we didn’t give instructions for.”

Shin acknowledged that LG Energy “didn’t understand the culture of Poland at first”. He said the company has had “troubles in increasing the speed of mass production and the quality of production at the plant in Poland”.

LG Energy said its factory in Wroclaw is the biggest battery plant in Europe, with capacity to make cells for 1.2 million electric vehicles a year. The company plans to increase output to 100 GWh by 2025 from about 70 GWh, and increase the role of automation. 

“We think plants should be run by programs, not by humans,” Shin said. 

LG Energy employs more than 7,000 workers at the plant in Poland, and has said it plans to add about 1,000 more over the next three years. 

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After the initial struggles in delivering instructions to local workers in Poland, the issue has been resolved, Shin said. There was a difference in working cultures, he noted. 

Staff turnover was high in the early stages of production at the Wroclaw plant, which opened in 2018, with many Ukrainian employees there only on short-term visas, said Shin. 

“We should have been more meticulous in giving instructions to them,” he added.

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Speaking at the same conference in Seoul, Ecopro Co chief executive officer Song Hojun also said high costs and difficulty training local workers are affecting the company’s overseas expansion plans. The battery-materials maker is building a plant in Hungary. 

“Local workers at overseas plants are not as hard working as Korean employees,” Song said. BLOOMBERG