Ecopro BM. Co., Ltd.

Ecopro BM converts nickel sulfate and cobalt sulfate into NCM cathode materials by running both the precipitation stage and the high-temperature calcination stage inside the same facilities in South Korea, China, Hungary, and Malaysia, rather than shipping an intermediate product between two separate businesses. Because the two reactions run sequentially with no buffer inventory between them, the output chemistry of the precipitation step is tuned in real time against what the calcination furnace needs — and CATL and SK Innovation have spent years qualifying specific NCM compositions against exactly those process parameters, meaning a switch to any other supplier would restart the qualification clock from zero. That same integration is also the central vulnerability: the continuous line requires uninterrupted nickel sulfate from Class 1 producers — Vale, BHP, and Jinchuan — because lower-grade nickel changes the crystal geometry in the precursor, and that defect carries through the calcination into the finished cathode material, with no second-stage stockpile to bridge a supply gap. So the thing that makes Ecopro BM hard to replace — collapsing two chemically distinct stages into one coordinated process — is also the thing that means any disruption, whether a nickel allocation failure, an environmental permit revocation, or a power interruption at any of its four jurisdictions, simultaneously halts production and invalidates the years of qualification records its customers depend on.