POSCO is expanding its production capacity for premium automotive steel sheets as it seeks to strengthen its position in the future mobility market.
On Sep. 8, POSCO announced that it had broken ground for its No. 8 Continuous Galvanizing Line (8CGL) at the Gwangyang Works. The new facility will have an annual production capacity of 450,000 metric tons.
The 8CGL will specialize in producing hot-dip galvanized steel sheets for automotive exterior panels and is scheduled for completion in 2028. Hot-dip galvanized steel is coated with zinc, giving it strong corrosion resistance and an attractive surface finish. It is widely used for vehicle body panels and home-appliance materials.
Demand for the material has continued to rise as vehicles become more premium and sophisticated. Automakers increasingly require exterior-panel steel with improved paintability, corrosion resistance, and formability.
The project marks POSCO's first new hot-dip galvanizing facility in nine years, following its previous investment in 2017. In 2015, the company began construction of its No. 7 Continuous Galvanizing Line at Gwangyang, a 500,000-ton-per-year facility built with a total investment of 255.4 billion KRW. POSCO handled the entire process internally, from ordering and engineering design to fabrication and construction.
To meet demand for next-generation automotive steel amid the industry's shift toward larger, more premium vehicles, POSCO plans to invest about 480 billion KRW in the 8CGL project. Once completed, the investment will raise the company's total annual capacity for hot-dip galvanized steel to 4.95 million metric tons.
The new line is also expected to become a key production hub for lower-carbon automotive steel, in connection with a newly built electric arc furnace. POSCO plans to install ultra-high-temperature heat-treatment equipment optimized for electric-arc-furnace-produced steel sheets, helping meet global automakers' growing demand for lower-carbon steel.
The facility will also strengthen POSCO's capacity to produce wide automotive steel sheets for exterior panels used on mid-size and larger vehicles, including SUVs and recreational vehicles.
POSCO also plans to improve productivity and quality competitiveness through AI. Drawing on more than 30 years of operational expertise, the company will apply AI technologies to analyze material, process, and quality data in real time and control equipment accordingly. The goal is to reduce quality variation and defects while improving manufacturing efficiency.
The company also plans to accelerate manufacturing AI transformation by deploying AI and robots for high-risk tasks, such as removing impurities from molten zinc or collecting samples from high-temperature liquid zinc.
“By building POSCO's specialized automotive steel production facilities, capable of producing next-generation, high-quality automotive steel with stronger cost and technology competitiveness, we will further reinforce POSCO's technology leadership amid intensifying global competition,” POSCO President Lee Hee-keun said.
