Hello, this is Editor Z from EV blogZ.com.
We first covered InterBattery 2025 back in February 2025, before the show opened. That event has since come and gone — and so has its successor, InterBattery 2026, held this past March. Since a US reader searching for "InterBattery" today is far more likely to be checking what actually happened, or what's coming next, than reading a pre-show press release, we're rebuilding this post as a proper record: what the 2025 show delivered against its projections, what changed at the 2026 edition, and what's already confirmed for 2027. We're also digging into why a trade show at COEX in Seoul matters to anyone shopping for or investing in EVs in the United States.
What InterBattery Is
InterBattery is South Korea's flagship battery trade show, run at COEX in Seoul since 2013 by the Korea Battery Industry Association alongside COEX and KOTRA, with the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy as host. It's where Korea's three battery majors — LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, and SK On — show up alongside Chinese rivals like CATL, BYD, and EVE, materials suppliers, and equipment makers, making it one of the few venues where you can see the entire battery supply chain's roadmap in one building.
| Edition | Dates | Exhibitors | Visitors | Exhibition Area |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| InterBattery 2025 (actual) | March 5–7, 2025 | 688 companies | ~77,000 | 40,000+ ㎡ |
| InterBattery 2026 (actual) | March 11–13, 2026 | 688 exhibitors, 2,330 booths | ~75,000 | 40,000+ ㎡ |
| InterBattery 2027 (planned) | March 10–12, 2027 | 700+ expected | 77,000+ expected | 40,000+ ㎡ |
Note the correction from our original preview: we had projected "over 640 companies" and "over 75,000 attendees" for 2025 based on 2024 figures. The actual 2025 show beat both estimates, landing at 688 exhibitors and roughly 77,000 visitors, with participants from 13 countries including the US, Japan, the UK, China, and the Netherlands.
InterBattery 2025, in Retrospect
The dominant theme at the 2025 show wasn't a new product — it was survival strategy. EV sales growth had slowed sharply through 2024, an industry-wide slump that Korean trade press took to calling the "EV chasm." Exhibitors spent the show explaining how they'd ride it out rather than unveiling breakthrough chemistries.
What Was Actually on the Floor
LG Chem, running a 270-square-meter booth, showed the clearest example of that survival strategy: diversification away from pure high-nickel EV cells. Its lineup included LPF (LG's Precursor Free) — Korea's first mass-produced precursor-free process for cathode materials — an ultra-high-nickel cathode above 96% nickel content, a high-voltage mid-nickel cathode, and high-density LFP variants, including LFP blended with NCM. On the safety side, LG Chem showed Nexula, an aerogel thermal barrier material meant to suppress thermal runaway propagation, plus a ceramic-coated SRS separator for added heat resistance. None of this made headlines outside the trade press, but it reflected where R&D budgets were actually going in early 2025: incremental chemistry and safety margin, not a single dramatic leap.
Participating Companies
LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, and SK On all exhibited, alongside CATL, BYD, and EVE from China. The show's stated ambition — collaborations targeting North American and European buyers — mattered more in hindsight than it seemed at the time, since 2025 was also the year US tariff and sourcing rules started reshaping where those companies would actually build cells.
InterBattery 2026: The Show That Just Happened
InterBattery 2026 ran March 11–13, 2026, its 14th edition, with the same 688-exhibitor count as 2025 but spread across 2,330 booths and roughly 75,000 visitors. The headline shift from 2025 wasn't scale — it was subject matter. Instead of talking survival, exhibitors talked about new demand: energy storage systems (ESS), robotics, and urban air mobility (UAM) were pitched as growth markets to offset the still-sluggish EV segment.
Solid-State Batteries Took Center Stage
The clearest sign of where R&D money moved in the year between shows: all three Korean majors put all-solid-state batteries — trade press called them "game changers" — at the front of their booths, rather than treating them as a lab-curiosity sideshow the way they had in 2025.
- Samsung SDI fielded the largest booth of any exhibitor, built around the slogan "AI thinks, Battery enables," positioning batteries as infrastructure for AI-era power demand rather than just EV range.
- Ecopro showed solid electrolytes, cathode materials for solid-state cells, and lithium-metal anodes still in development, with a stated mass-production target of 2027.
- Mintech displayed inspection equipment built specifically for solid-state batteries, plus safety diagnostic tools for used EV batteries — a sign the supply chain around solid-state production, not just the cells themselves, is maturing.
The practical read for EV shoppers: solid-state cells are closer to pilot-line reality than they were a year ago, but "2027 mass production target" from a materials supplier is still a materials supplier's target, not a car you can order. Treat solid-state timelines from any battery show as directional, not a delivery date.
Why a Seoul Trade Show Matters to a US EV Buyer
It's fair to ask why an American reader should care about a convention hall in Seoul. The answer is that the companies filling that hall are also the ones building battery plants across the US, and US policy is actively steering how much of that manufacturing stays viable.
- LG Energy Solution is investing 7.2 trillion won (about $5.6 billion) in a battery complex in Queen Creek, Arizona.
- BlueOval SK, the SK–Ford joint venture, is spending a combined $11.4 billion on an assembly and battery complex in Tennessee and two battery plants in Kentucky.
- Samsung SDI is ramping ESS cell manufacturing in Kokomo, Indiana toward 30 GWh by the end of 2026, alongside SK Battery America's ESS line in Commerce, Georgia.
All of this rides on the Section 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit — $35 per kWh for US-made cells, $10 per kWh for modules built from them. LG Energy Solution alone booked roughly KRW 1,647 billion (about $1.2 billion) in 45X benefit in fiscal year 2025. The 2025 reconciliation law (the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act") left that battery-component schedule intact through 2029, stepping it down to 75%, 50%, and 25% in 2030–2032 before it ends, but it also layered in new "prohibited foreign entity" sourcing tests starting in 2026 — meaning some of the same Chinese materials suppliers exhibiting at InterBattery could become disqualifying inputs for credit-eligible US cells. Separately, US ESS demand has been running hot enough that industry trackers were flagging a possible cell oversupply heading into 2026 — a caution flag on how fast Samsung SDI's and SK's US ESS ramps should actually be read against real order books, rather than against booth announcements made in Seoul.
What's Confirmed for InterBattery 2027
InterBattery 2027 is scheduled for March 10–12, 2027, back at COEX. The organizers are projecting 700+ exhibitors, 77,000+ attendees, and the same 40,000+ ㎡ footprint as recent editions — modest growth over 2026 rather than a step change. The standing program is expected to repeat: an opening ceremony, the Battery Job Fair, The Battery Conference, company seminars, an awards ceremony, investment sessions, and international buyer-matching programs.
As of this writing, visitor registration for 2027 is listed as "coming soon" on the official site, with no ticket pricing published yet. For reference, 2025's structure was a one-day pass at KRW 20,000 and a three-day pass at KRW 40,000, with an early-bird discount window that closed a week before the show — expect a similar tiered structure to reappear once 2027 registration opens, but don't rely on 2025's exact prices holding.
If You Can't Fly to Seoul
Most of what matters from InterBattery reaches English-language readers within days of the show closing, without anyone needing a plane ticket. LG Chem, Samsung SDI, and LG Energy Solution all publish English recap posts on their own newsrooms and blogs, and trade outlets like The Elec and ESS News cover exhibitor announcements in real time during the show. If solid-state batteries or ESS are the parts you actually care about, following those outlets around the second week of March will get you the substance without the badge fee.
The Bottom Line
InterBattery has quietly shifted from an EV-battery show into a broader energy-storage-and-power show, and the 2026 edition made that explicit with its ESS, robotics, and UAM framing. For US readers, the numbers that matter most aren't the exhibitor counts — they're the US factory investments and the 45X credit rules attached to them, since those determine whether the technology shown off in Seoul each March actually shows up in an American-made battery pack. We'll be back with a fresh look once InterBattery 2027 registration opens and the exhibitor list firms up.
-EditorZ
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