Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
EcoPro BM makes the cathode materials that go into lithium-ion batteries for electric cars.
EcoPro BM makes the stuff inside electric-car batteries that actually stores the energy. Its product is cathode material — a fine powder, mostly made of nickel, that gets coated onto metal foil and becomes the positive side of a battery cell. When you hear about a car going 400 kilometers on a charge, the cathode is a big reason why.
The company sells this powder by the ton to battery makers, who turn it into cells and pack them into electric vehicles. Its customers include the big Korean cell makers LG Energy Solution and Samsung SDI, and for years its largest customer has been SK On, the battery arm of SK Innovation — a relationship that once made up the vast majority of its sales, which cuts both ways: a guaranteed pipeline when things go well, and a scary concentration when they don't. It is headquartered in Cheongju, South Korea, and also runs a plant in Hungary to supply European customers closer to home. The edge is in the recipe. Cathodes with more nickel hold more energy, but nickel-rich material is finicky to make at scale — it reacts with air, cracks under stress, and has to be manufactured with tight process control. EcoPro BM has spent years tuning that recipe and building factories that can churn out millions of tons reliably. It also makes precursor material, the feedstock for cathodes, through its parent EcoPro, which helps keep a chunk of the value chain in-house.
In 1997, Lee Dong-che, a successful accountant, read a magazine article about the Kyoto Protocol and a simple idea stuck: if the world was going to fight global warming, industries tied to that fight would grow for years. So he started EcoPro in a tiny single office in Seoul, making environmental materials and chemical filters. Those early products kept failing, but the bet on a growing industry was made.
A few years later, EcoPro joined a government-backed project to develop very high-capacity lithium batteries, working with Cheil Industries on a key ingredient for cathodes. That partnership led Cheil to offer EcoPro its precursor business plus its cathode technology and business rights. Cathode demand looked weak at the time, which made the offer a real gamble.
EcoPro built its first cathode plant in 2008 and began supplying high-nickel cathode materials at home. But the cathode business lost money for roughly ten years, a stretch the company president later called "like hell." The company had jumped into a hard, slow business that refused to pay off for a long time.
In 2016, the cathode business was split off into its own company called EcoPro BM. It was still a small business, with revenue under 100 billion won that year. The dedicated company would soon become the center of everything.
EcoPro BM went public on the KOSDAQ market in 2019, the same year it finished its fifth cathode plant in Pohang. The listing gave the company public money and a public reputation just as the electric car boom was starting to build.
Then came the deal that changed the company's size overnight: a supply agreement with SK Innovation worth about 10 trillion won over three years. Investors went wild, and the stock jumped nearly 19% on the day it was announced. There was a catch, though: the order called for far more cathode material each year than EcoPro BM had planned to make by 2023, so it had to grow fast to keep its promise.
In early 2022, a fire at the Cheongju plant killed one employee. It was a hard reminder that this fast-growing business was built on factories where things can go badly wrong.
In 2024, EcoPro BM merged with EcoPro Global and took over the group's overseas operations. A year later, the parent group formally made EcoPro BM the intermediate holding company for its battery-materials business, putting it at the center of the whole empire.
The good times did not last. A slowdown in electric car demand, plus weak lithium and nickel prices, hit the business hard: revenue in 2024 fell about 60% and the company swung to an operating loss. EcoPro BM withdrew its planned move to the KOSPI listing about three months after applying, and the stock fell more than 10% on the news. The company said it would try again once business improved.
Even in the downturn, EcoPro BM kept building. Its Hungary Campus, the company's European production base, was completed in late 2025. The plant is the company's ticket to winning European automaker customers when electric car demand recovers.
By 2026, the bill for all that factory building had come due, and weak electric car demand made it worse. EcoPro BM announced a 1.2 trillion won rights offering, and investors were not happy: the stock fell sharply, and the company had to cut the issue price and shrink the raise to about 886 billion won. Most of the money went to a nickel smelter in Indonesia, with the rest for Hungary. The squeeze was real, with roughly 95% of revenue coming from just two customers, Samsung SDI and SK On.
Looking for its next growth engine, EcoPro BM agreed with Samsung SDI in late 2026 to jointly develop materials for sulfide-based solid-state batteries, aiming for commercial mass production by 2027. EcoPro BM would make the solid electrolyte and high-nickel cathodes, building on its pilot plant and government research funding. It was a bet on the battery chemistry that could come after today's liquid-electrolyte cells.
The business is brutally cyclical and tied to one giant bet: how fast the world buys electric cars. After years of explosive growth, the EV market cooled in 2024 and 2025, battery makers cut orders, and cathode prices fell hard along with the nickel and lithium inside them. EcoPro BM swung to losses, paused some expansion plans, and its shares — once a KOSDAQ darling worth tens of billions — came back to earth. It is also exposed to policy: US rules on where battery materials can come from, and tariffs, shape who it can sell to. The long-term question is simple. If electric cars keep winning, someone has to make the powder, and EcoPro BM is one of the few companies that can make a lot of it well.
Saved answer · last researched 4 Nov 2026