LG Electronics has launched its first electric vehicle (EV) charger station outside of South Korea, in Fort Worth, Texas, in an effort to take a portion of North America’s competitive EV charging market.
LG’s new EV charging station facility, covering 59,202 square feet, has the potential to generate more than 10,000 chargers each year, according to a company statement released Monday. LG has begun producing 11-kilowatt EV chargers in Texas. It will begin producing chargers with a capacity of 175 kilowatts in the first half of the year and 350 kilowatts later in the year.
The move follows LG CEO William Cho’s continuous commitment to ‘electrification’ as a main engine of medium- and long-term development, with a sales target of $79 billion by 2030, up from $51.4 billion in 2022.
That cannot arrive soon enough. LG anticipated this month that its largest division’s full-year sales in 2023 would be KRW 84 trillion (about $63.6 billion at today’s values), which is virtually unchanged from KRW 83.5 trillion in 2022.
With high-profile but eventually decreasing industries like mobile phones behind it (the firm exited the phone market in 2021), LG has been looking for new business prospects in sectors such as EV charging and digital healthcare.
LG feels that entering the U.S. EV industry and capitalizing on increased demand for EV chargers might be a profitable move.
By December 2023, the United States had more than 165,000 public EV charging outlets. President Biden plans to deploy at least 500,000 public chargers by 2030.
However, not everything is going well. A typical chicken-and-egg situation has hampered the market expansion of charging networks, as the White House noted last month: customers’ worries about a lack of charging outlets have contributed to lower purchase rates for electric cars. However, due to insufficient demand, the rollout of charging outlets is delayed.
Meanwhile, there is a recurring issue with the charging stations that are already installed: many of them simply do not function or do not operate on the system that your specific vehicle may utilize.
However, having the government fund larger initiatives has provided LG with the necessary incentive.
“By establishing our EV charger production factory in Texas, we will be able to actively respond to the rapidly growing demand for EV infrastructure in the United States,” stated Jand Ik-hwan, President of LG Business Solution Company.
According to LG, the decision to locate its first EV charger manufacturing plant in Texas was deliberate. According to LG, the state provides the advantages of employing existing infrastructure as well as logistics and transportation networks.
The firm, which has been creating EV chargers since 2018, will purchase HiEV Charger, previously AppleMango, a South Korean EV battery charger manufacturer, in 2022 to expand the EV charging industry and produce EV chargers in its home nation.
