Catena-X Comes to Korea Through LG Uplus

Pebblous Data Communication Team

Executive Summary

A telecom operator has taken on the work of putting Korean manufacturers into the data-sharing system of Europe's car industry. LG Uplus said on November 13 that it had signed the Korea Trusted Manufacturing Data Ecosystem Partnership with Catena-X, Cofinity-X and IBCT on the afternoon of November 11, at its Yongsan headquarters in Seoul. Catena-X is a European data ecosystem in which carmakers and their suppliers hand over figures such as carbon emissions and part production histories under one common standard, and Cofinity-X is the company that runs that ecosystem as a commercial service. Four tasks went into the document: getting more Korean manufacturers into the ecosystem, bringing the Catena-X data standard onto domestic factory floors, linking data between supply chain companies here and overseas, and finding cases where it all works in Korea.

Regulation is what set the clock. The EU battery regulation requires a digital passport from February 18, 2027 on electric vehicle batteries, on batteries for light means of transport such as e-bikes, and on industrial batteries above 2 kWh. The passport carries a carbon footprint declaration, recycled content information and supply chain due diligence records. It is the first digital product passport anywhere to be made mandatory. Korean manufacturing, though, is not standing at the starting line. L&F cleared the country's first Catena-X compatibility test in December 2025, and KG Mobility, LG Chem and Shinsung Autotech, among others, showed Asia's first multi-tier carbon footprint exchange in July 2026. What this pact mostly does is widen the road those companies cut, out toward the smaller suppliers.

The facts and figures carried in sections 1 through 4 come from Korean reporting on the pact, the EU battery regulation and the European Commission's guidance, material published by Catena-X, Cofinity-X and LG Electronics, reporting on L&F, and an interview with the chief executive of IBCT. The size of the investment behind the pact and the list of participating companies have not been disclosed, and this article could not confirm them. The back half of section 3 and all of section 5, which read the news as a question about what one line of data is asked for when it crosses a border, are Pebblous's interpretation.

Key figures

The first two numbers are the deadline Europe set and the range that deadline covers. The other two mark ground Korean companies have already covered ahead of it.

Sources: Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 Article 77, Newsis, Cofinity-X.

Feb 18, 2027

The day the EU digital battery passport becomes mandatory

The first digital product passport anywhere to be required by law

2 kWh

Capacity above which an industrial battery needs a passport

EV and light transport batteries are covered at any capacity

12 firms

Companies in the Daegu project behind the country's first Catena-X test

December 2025; the test subject was cathode material from the Guji plant

July 2026

When Asia's first multi-tier carbon footprint exchange was shown

A cluster part in the KG Mobility Musso, traced from raw material to assembly

1

Not One of the Pact's Four Tasks Builds a Factory

Four people signed. Kwon Yong-hyun, executive vice president and head of the enterprise business at LG Uplus; Nadine Kanja, who leads the industry side of Catena-X; Thomas Rösch, chief executive of Cofinity-X; and Lee Jeong-ryun, chief executive of IBCT. The agreement is called the Korea Trusted Manufacturing Data Ecosystem Partnership. What that list says is that the four bring different things. The body that writes the standard, the company that runs it as a commercial service, the firm that walks Korean companies through joining and building, and the operator that has laid network and cloud infrastructure at home all put their names on one page.

Participant	What it brings
Catena-X	Writes and maintains the data standard
Cofinity-X	Runs the ecosystem commercially on top of that standard
IBCT	Helps Korean companies sign up and apply the technology
LG Uplus	Supplies network, cloud, security and systems integration, plus its B2B sales reach

▲ How the four organizations split the work, as reported on November 13.

The work they agreed to take on was written as four items: wider participation by Korean manufacturers in Catena-X, application of the Catena-X data standard to manufacturing here, data links among supply chain companies at home and abroad, and the search for Korean use cases. Put the four side by side and one thing stands out. Not one of them involves buying equipment or putting up a plant. All four turn numbers that already sit inside the factory into a shape that someone outside can read.

Announcing the pact, Kwon said that in global manufacturing it is no longer enough to build a good product, and that the ability to pass needed data to supply chain partners safely and smoothly now counts for as much. On the strength of the company's network, cloud, security and systems integration work, he said, LG Uplus intends to make it easier for Korean manufacturers to take part in the global data supply chain. The company says it will start with carmakers and their suppliers and move into other manufacturing sectors from there.

One more thing LG Uplus named as a point of the pact is a possible connection to K-Data Space, the domestic effort to build a framework for pooling, trading and sharing industrial data. While that framework has been going up at home, how it would mesh with the European system has stayed an open question. Giving Korean companies a standardized way to move data between themselves and overseas supply chain partners is the goal the company wrote down.

This is not a first step. LG Uplus and IBCT already launched a joint business in September covering everything from signing Korean manufacturers up to Catena-X to building and running their systems. Six weeks later, Catena-X, which holds the standard, and Cofinity-X, which runs the commercial service, came in as parties themselves, making it four. Which is another way of saying that the gaps domestic sales alone could not fill were the standard and the operation of it.

2

Catena-X Leaves Each Company's Data Where It Sits

The name invites you to picture one enormous shared database. The design runs the other way. Catena-X is a non-profit association led by the German car industry, and also the name of the rules that association sets; instead of gathering data in one place, it has each company keep its own data on its own servers and hand over defined items under defined permissions. It is widely counted as the first large implementation to come out of Gaia-X, Europe's data sovereignty initiative. BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen are among the carmakers taking part.

Why the design came out this way is readable from where it started. In Korea, Catena-X is usually introduced as a channel for answering carbon rules, and the job usually lands with a sustainability team. Lee Jeong-ryun, whose firm IBCT is the Korean partner of Cofinity-X, pushed back on that framing in an interview that ran under a headline saying Catena-X is not ESG. The German car industry built this system, he argued, because original equipment makers and their suppliers had spent years unable to trust each other's data, and carbon is one of many items layered on top of that problem. It also explains why pooling the originals in one place was never the chosen design. Between parties who do not trust each other, that proposal does not carry.

So taking part means less filling out a membership form than meeting a specification. A company stands up a certified connector, attaches rules saying who may see which items for how long, and writes its numbers under agreed names and units. The diagram below sets the two approaches next to each other.

▲ Original Pebblous diagram, setting the distributed structure described in public Catena-X material against the pooled alternative.

A connector sounds like hardware, but open it up and it is mostly a bundle of agreements. Whether the company sending the data really is that company is settled with decentralized identifiers; the procedure and the channel for the handover are fixed by the Data Space Protocol; and holding the shape of a value steady, so the receiving system reads it to mean the same thing, falls to the digital twin specification known as the Asset Administration Shell. None of these is technology Catena-X invented. Tying scattered specifications into one bundle, nailing them down, and certifying that a company implemented them properly is what the association actually does.

The items that travel between companies fall into three families. Sustainability covers the product carbon footprint, the digital product passport and circular economy information. Traceability follows where a part came from and where it went. Quality shares defect records and process conditions. Of the three, the carbon footprint is the one under the most pressure right now.

International standards for calculating a carbon footprint already exist. The trouble is how much room for interpretation they leave. Where the boundary of a product is drawn, which emission factor is used for electricity, how recycled input is counted: change those and the same process yields a different number. That is why Catena-X built a separate product carbon footprint rulebook and has revised it through a fourth edition as of September 2025. It fills the cells the international standards left blank with a binding specification, so that numbers written by different companies can be laid in the same place and added up.

3

From February 2027, a Battery Travels With a Passport

Article 77 of the EU battery regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, requires an electronic record on batteries placed on the European market from February 18, 2027. It applies to electric vehicle batteries, to batteries for light means of transport such as e-bikes and electric scooters, and to industrial batteries above 2 kWh. The identifier is unique to the individual product rather than the model, and a QR code printed on the battery leads to the record.

What goes into that record is what matters here. Alongside the identity, performance and durability of the battery sit the carbon footprint declaration required under Article 7, the recycled content information required under Article 8, and supply chain due diligence records. The due diligence obligation, which checks how raw materials were sourced, was pushed back two years to August 18, 2027 by an amendment, but no such postponement is attached to the passport date of February 18, 2027. Batteries become the first mandatory case in a digital product passport regime that will spread to other product groups.

How many cells there are to fill was settled in guidance the European Commission issued on August 21, 2026. A battery passport can hold 71 data items in total; of those, 51 are mandatory for electric vehicle batteries, 54 for light means of transport batteries and 36 for industrial batteries. Place and date of manufacture, weight and capacity, chemical composition, hazardous substances and critical raw material information all sit in there. The guidance also splits who may look at each item. Some are open to anyone, some only to parties with a legitimate interest, some only to notified bodies and market surveillance authorities. Values that change during use, such as battery state of health or usage history, were put in the narrower tiers. Writing the number and sending it is not the end of the job; who may see how much of it has to be written as well.

Why filling those cells is hard has been spelled out by a company that walked the road earlier. LG Electronics wrote on its official blog that a good share of the carbon footprint numbers now in circulation are not primary data from the production floor but secondary data leaning on industry averages. A process improvement barely shifts the number; when a customer audits, a separate explanation has to be attached; and comparing one supplier against another gets harder. That line between a declared value and a verifiable one is what Catena-X is aiming at.

How wide the gap between the two runs has been measured once in public Catena-X material. In a pilot where Ford, its tier-one supplier Flex and its tier-two supplier Micron passed primary data across three tiers, the footprint calculated that way came out 46 percent lower than a value based on industry averages. The three used different solutions, and the chain of values still held together. The 46 percent comes from a single pilot, but it gives a sense of how far a cell filled with an average can sit from a cell that was actually measured.

A number that arrives without where and how it was produced is a number the receiving side cannot use. So when we say one line of carbon data becomes a condition of trade, the point is not the size of the figure. The point is whether that line carries the calculation boundary, the factors, the time of measurement and the origin of the underlying data. Selling into a supply chain used to mean the goods had to pass the buyer's specification. Now the data about those goods has to pass the buyer's format.

4

The Big Exporters Are Already Inside, Their Suppliers Are Not

Read this pact as Korea's starting signal and you miss the previous year. On December 7, 2025, the city of Daegu announced that L&F had become the first company in the country to complete a Catena-X sandbox test, through a demonstration factory the city had funded. The sandbox test is the standard compatibility check for entering the European supply chain data network. The subject was cathode material made at the Guji plant in Daegu, and the run confirmed a path for passing carbon emission and raw material tracing information up to the carmaker. Twelve companies, LS Electric among them, took part in that demonstration project. Ten months later, on October 12, 2026, L&F said it had received a third-party verification opinion from LRQA, under the international standard ISO 14067, for the carbon footprint calculated for cathode material from the same plant. First the format it could send in, then the question of whether the value inside that format had been examined from outside.

A longer chain was turning over the same stretch of time. LG Electronics' Vehicle Solutions division, LG Chem, supply chain companies including Shinsung Autotech, and the carmaker KG Mobility began a product carbon footprint data exchange pilot in May 2026, and the result was presented in Cologne that July as Asia's first multi-tier exchange. The subject was a cluster part going into the KG Mobility Musso (Q270). Several stages, from raw material to final assembly, were strung together into one footprint handover, and a connector from the carbon management platform Glassdome ran on Cofinity-X infrastructure. Hanno Focken, managing director of Catena-X, said at the time: "This project marks an important milestone for Catena-X, with the first Korean OEM enabling standardized carbon data exchange across its supply chain."

▲ Original Pebblous diagram, built from dates confirmed in press reporting across the past year.

Go down the list of names and the pattern shows. Cathode material, battery materials, vehicle electronics, finished cars: companies with heavy exposure to European exports and enough headcount to assign someone to this full time. The number of companies actually moving data in Catena-X grew from 182 in December 2025 to 1,069 in September 2026, more than fivefold in nine months. Yet what Catena-X has put up as its next step is not a larger headline number but pulling smaller suppliers further down the chain up into the system. Europe chose to have the public purse carry part of that cost. A support program funded with 23 million euros from Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, run jointly by the International Data Spaces Association and Catena-X, started in June 2026; it pays European automotive small and medium-sized firms up to 15,000 euros once they have actually run onboarding and certificate management, and the same amount again if they bring a second use case on board. The money is not a subsidy that refunds what was spent but a reward paid after a productive data exchange with a trading partner has been confirmed. That reward also says how heavily the cost of standing up a connector, managing certificates and staying compliant lands on a small company.

At the second and third tiers, one person commonly handles quality, safety and carbon at once. Lee Jeong-ryun described the structure this way: when an original equipment maker at the top asks for data, the tier-one supplier and then the tier-two and tier-three suppliers all have to respond in turn. The request comes down once from the top, but the places that have to absorb it multiply along the chain. In another interview he noted that among the tens of thousands of second and third tier suppliers around Ulsan, Yangsan, Changwon and Busan, many do not know what a digital product passport is.

That is the gap this pact targets. The place a telecom operator steps into is not the writing of a new standard but the lowering of the cost of climbing onto one that already stands. It is closer to packaging the sign-up process, the connector, security and operations and selling them together. Whether the paths the early movers cut individually can be turned into a public road will decide this pact.

5

Why Pebblous Is Watching This Pact

News like this usually reads as a telecom operator's new business story. Seen from the data side, another point remains. The numbers on Korean factory floors are being rearranged into a format someone else defined, at industrial scale, and that process is about as close as it gets to the physical form of the phrase AI-Ready Data. Having values stacked on a factory server and having those values usable from outside are entirely different things.

Translate what Catena-X demands into the language of data quality and a familiar list appears. Names and units agreed on. The ability to follow which process and which moment a value came from. Rules for who may see what, written so a machine can read them. That is the schema, the lineage and the access control asked of a training dataset, unchanged. It is no accident that supply chain data and training data face the same demands. Both are data used by someone other than the person who made it.

So there are three things worth watching alongside this pact.

Not how many Korean use cases appear, but how far down the tiers they reach. A chain in which only tier-one suppliers take part fills the levels above with averages again.
Whether the link to K-Data Space stays a possibility on paper, or whether translation between the two specifications actually runs. Joining two systems tends to get stuck on matching the names of items.
Who pays the cost of taking part. For a small supplier, a connector and certificate management are not a one-time expense but an upkeep bill.

When Pebblous works on getting data into a state an AI can use, the reason we treat the context attached to a value as a quality item, on a par with the accuracy of the value, is the same one. A wrong value gets caught in inspection. A value that is correct but carries no record of where it came from passes inspection and is still turned away by the other side. There is a great deal of overlap between data a European customer will not accept and data an AI model cannot learn properly from.

One question is left. Is the data in our factory ready to be read by someone else's standard? Answering it falls not to the four organizations whose names are on the agreement but to each plant preparing to ship.

R

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