LS ELECTRIC Stock (010120): The Korean Grid-Equipment Maker Whose Biggest Customer Is Its Own US Subsidiary

Every English-language story about Korea’s grid-equipment boom is really a story about transformers being sold out. LS ELECTRIC sits at the centre of that story — a $23.5bn company whose order book grew 38.5% in six months. Then you open its own half-year filing and find its extra-high-voltage transformer plants ran at 66.5% and 69.9% of capacity, its gross margin went down, and 41.7% of its power-infrastructure sales went to a customer it owns outright.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • The order book is real and growing fast. Group order backlog across all seven disclosed entities went from ₩6,488.9bn ($4.81bn) at end-2025 to ₩8,989.4bn ($6.66bn) at 30 June 2026 — up 38.5% in six months. Every one of the ten backlog bridges in the filing reconciles to the won. (Source: DART half-year report, filed 14 Aug 2026, rcpNo 20260814003088)
  • But the plants are not full. Busan (extra-high-voltage transformers, HVDC valves) ran at 69.9% utilisation in H1 2026; Cheongju No.2 (EHV gas-insulated switchgear and transformers) at 66.5%; subsidiary LS Power Solution’s Ulsan EHV plant at 73.7%. The one plant near full — Cheongju No.1 at 96.4% — makes low-voltage devices and meters, not the export products. (Same filing.)
  • Its largest customer is itself. LS ELECTRIC AMERICA Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary, took 41.7% of power-infrastructure segment sales in 2026 year-to-date, up from 31.2% in FY2025. All seven US “single sales/supply contract” filings since March 2025 — $1.16bn of them — name that subsidiary as the counterparty, not the end customer.
  • Margins went the wrong way where it counts (H1 2026). Operating margin rose from 8.80% to 10.33% year-on-year in the six months to June 2026 — but gross margin fell, from 21.68% to 21.40%. The entire gain came from spreading fixed overhead over 32.7% more revenue, not from better prices.
  • It is the least profitable and most expensive of Korea’s big three. Full-year FY2025 operating margin: LS ELECTRIC 8.59% vs HD Hyundai Electric 24.40% and Hyosung Heavy 12.52% — yet LS ELECTRIC trades at 109.9× FY2025 earnings against 35.1× and 52.0×. (Closes of 22 Sep 2026 from the Korea Exchange, divided by each company’s own disclosed FY2025 basic EPS — see the valuation section for the exact figures.)

Units and rates, stated once. All money figures are in US dollars, converted at ₩1,350.36/$1 — the 22 September 2026 rate, applied identically throughout. Where a figure matters more in won (share prices, and the amounts a filing itself prints in won) we give the won as well. Share prices show won first, because that is what you will see on a KRX screen. Contract values are quoted in the dollars the filing itself states, not re-converted by us — Korean supply-contract disclosures print their own USD amount and their own exchange rate, and re-converting creates a number that exists nowhere. Market data is from the Korea Exchange as of the settled close of 22 September 2026; 23 September was the last session before the Chuseok holiday but the exchange had not published it when this was written, so we do not use it.

🏢 What Is LS ELECTRIC, and What Does It Actually Sell?

LS ELECTRIC is the Korean maker of the equipment that sits between a power plant and a wall socket — circuit breakers, switchgear, meters, protective relays, extra-high-voltage transformers and HVDC converter gear — plus a smaller factory-automation business selling PLCs and inverters. It is not a utility, and it does not generate electricity. It sells the hardware that moves and protects it.

The company was established on 24 July 1974 and listed on the Korea Exchange in July 1994. It is headquartered at LS Tower in Anyang, just south of Seoul, with domestic plants in Cheongju (Chungbuk), Cheonan (Chungnam) and Busan. Registered capital is ₩150.0bn ($111.1M). As of 31 December 2025 the parent company employed 3,482 people with average tenure of 16.0 years. Co-CEOs are Koo Ja-kyun (chairman) and Chae Dae-seok. (Source: DART annual report FY2025, filed 18 Mar 2026, rcpNo 20260318001243.)

One naming point matters before you search for anything: the company was called LS산전 — LS Industrial Systems — until March 2020, when it renamed itself 엘에스일렉트릭 / LS ELECTRIC. Most English-language material older than 2020 is filed under the old name. There is an English Wikipedia entry for LS Electric if you want a neutral entity anchor, and the company runs an English corporate site.

The filing names its own customers plainly: for the power business, “domestic and overseas power authorities, exclusive dealers, data centres and energy-intensive industrial companies”; for automation, “automotive, electronics, semiconductor and display production-equipment makers, IT companies and smart-factory businesses.” The consolidated group contained 42 companies at 30 June 2026 — and it also contained 42 at end-2025 and 42 at end-2024, up from 28 at end-2023. The count has been flat for three reporting periods, which matters a great deal in a moment, because something else about the group’s internal trading did not stay flat. (Source: DART annual report FY2025, rcpNo 20260318001243, consolidated-subsidiary overview and the 52nd/51st/50th fiscal-year comparison table.)

📊 Where Does LS ELECTRIC’s Revenue Actually Come From?

About four-fifths of it is the power business, and you cannot read that share off the percentages the filing prints — because the filing states the power segment at 110.8% of total revenue. That is not an error. Korean segment disclosures report each segment before eliminating sales between group companies, then reconcile to consolidated revenue with a single negative line. Add the segments up and you get more than 100%.

Here is the honest version, with both denominators shown so you can see the gap.

Segment FY2024 FY2025 H1 2026 % of segment total (H1 26) Pre-tax margin (H1 26)
Power $3,012M $3,720M $2,424M 81.82% 8.65%
Automation $437M $429M $210M 7.08% 2.88%
Metals (copper & stainless tube) $458M $476M $269M 9.07% 3.18%
IT services $86M $102M $60M 2.03% 4.79%
Intra-group elimination −$623M −$1,050M −$776M — —
Consolidated revenue $3,371M $3,677M $2,187M 100% 10.52%

Segment revenue is stated before intra-group elimination; consolidated revenue is after. FY2024 and FY2025 are twelve months, H1 2026 is six months — they are not comparable line-to-line. “Pre-tax margin” uses the filing’s segment pre-tax profit over that segment’s pre-elimination revenue. Source: DART annual report FY2025 (rcpNo 20260318001243) and half-year report H1 2026 (rcpNo 20260814003088). Converted at ₩1,350.36/$1.

Two things jump out. First, automation is 7.1% of segment revenue and 2.7% of segment pre-tax profit. Anyone describing LS ELECTRIC as a diversified power-and-automation company is describing a rounding error: on FY2025 numbers the power segment produced 94.2% of segment pre-tax profit. Second, the elimination line is growing much faster than revenue — from 18.5% of consolidated revenue in FY2024 to 28.5% in FY2025 to 35.5% in H1 2026. Sales inside the group are nearly doubling as a share of the business. We will come back to why.

Geographically, the filing gives a split that it explicitly labels as before intra-group elimination — its own note reads “the above financial information is stated before the elimination of internal transactions.” On FY2025 figures totalling $4,727M, Korea was $2,017M, North America $1,391M, other Asia $735M, Europe $286M, China $217M and other $80M. The standout is North America, which grew 44.5% year-on-year (from $963M), against 10.0% for Korea.

Treat that 44.5% as a gross figure, not a demand figure. The pre-elimination North America line is exactly the line that carries the parent’s sales to its own US subsidiary — the subject of the next-but-one section — so it cannot be read as end-market growth. The parent-only (separate) accounts give a second reading of the same market on a narrower basis, and it points the same way: North America revenue of $654M in FY2025 against $436M in FY2024, up 49.95%. Both bases are gross of the intercompany billing. Neither is evidence about the end customer; both are evidence that a great deal more product is moving into North America. (Source: DART annual report FY2025, rcpNo 20260318001243 — consolidated and separate segment notes, “revenue by region”. Won amounts of ₩6,383.0bn / ₩2,724.1bn / ₩1,879.1bn / ₩993.1bn / ₩385.6bn / ₩293.4bn / ₩107.8bn and ₩1,300.1bn consolidated; ₩882,949mn and ₩588,829mn separate.)

The filing also states there was no single customer above 10% of consolidated revenue in FY2025 or FY2024 — a claim we are going to test directly.

🗓️ How LS ELECTRIC Got Here: A Short History

Three things rebuilt this company: a 2022 reorganisation that put its Americas businesses under a single US holding entity, a 2024 acquisition that bought it a transformer factory, and roughly ₩100.8bn of capacity added at Busan in 2025 for extra-high-voltage transformers. The order wins followed the factories, not the other way round.

Year What happened
1974 (Jul) Company established to make electrical, electronic, measurement, information and automation equipment.
1994 (Jul) Listed on the Korea Exchange.
2020 (Mar) Renamed from LS산전 (LS Industrial Systems) to LS ELECTRIC.
2021 (Jan) “Vision 2030 — Drive Change for 2030” announced. Cheongju plant named a World Economic Forum Lighthouse Factory that September.
2022 (Aug) LS ELECTRIC America Inc. contributed in kind to create LS ELECTRIC Americas Holdings; LS Energy Solutions folded into the same holding. The US structure that now dominates the numbers dates from here.
2023 (Jun) Bastrop Tech Center established in Texas.
2024 (May–Sep) ₩100.8bn ($75M) committed to expand EHV transformer capacity at Busan. 51% of KOC Electric agreed in May; control transferred September; renamed LS Power Solution in March 2025. This is the transformer subsidiary.
2024 (Dec) ₩561.0bn HVDC converter contract for the East Coast–East Seoul line, via KAPES. Largest single disclosed contract in the period — and, per its own filing, VAT-inclusive.
2025 (Jul) MOU with GE Vernova to localise HVDC converter valves.
2025 (Oct–Nov) Busan No.2 production building completed. Weeks later, a $312.0M EHV transformer order for a North American investor-owned utility — the single largest US order in the set.
2026 (Apr) 1-for-5 face-value stock split takes effect; new shares list 13 April. Stated purpose: expand the float.

Source: DART annual report FY2025 (rcpNo 20260318001243), company-history and subsidiary-history sections, plus the individual contract filings cited below. Won amounts are as the company states them.

🌍 Is LS ELECTRIC Actually a Global Leader in Grid Equipment?

It is the dominant player in its home market — a company-estimated 63.8% of Korean low- and high-voltage power devices in FY2025 — but it publishes no market share at all for extra-high-voltage transformers or HVDC equipment, which are the products the “Korea is winning the transformer race” narrative is actually about. Those are two different claims, and they are being traded as one.

The company does disclose market share, and the tables are easy to miss because they sit one subsection below the business description. There are five of them, all labelled as the company’s own estimates, all limited to Korea, and all limited to mass-produced items — the filing says so in the header: “the domestic market shares of principal products as estimated by the company at the end of the current period, recorded only for mass-produced products the company manufactures.”

Product (domestic Korea, company estimate) FY2025 FY2024 FY2023
Power devices (low & high voltage) 63.8% 61.6% 63.0%
Switchboards / distribution panels 32.6% 26.6% 26.0%
Factory-automation equipment 31.4% 30.2% 31.5%
Copper tube (LS Metal) 35% 35% 36%
Stainless tube (LS Metal) 16% 16% 22%

Domestic Korean share only, the company’s own estimate, mass-produced products only. The filing labels the columns by fiscal-year ordinal — 52nd = FY2025, 51st = FY2024, 50th = FY2023. Source: DART annual report FY2025 (rcpNo 20260318001243), section II “Business overview”, subsection ④ 시장점유율 (market share) — under (1) 전력부문 > (i) 전력수배전 사업 for the first two rows, (2) 자동화부문 for automation, and (3) 금속부문 > 동관 점유율 / STS관 점유율 for the LS Metal rows.

Two things in that table are worth drawing out. The switchboard share went from 26.0% to 32.6% in two years, which is real domestic share gain in a competitive product. And the stainless-tube share went the other way, 22% to 16%. Neither of those is a transformer number.

What the filing gives no share figure for is the export franchise: extra-high-voltage transformers, HVDC converter equipment and gas-insulated switchgear. Those are made to order, not mass-produced, so they fall outside the stated scope of every table above. The company also omits prices for the same reason, writing that order-based power products are priced to each customer’s specification — so there is no price series either. If you have read a global market-share number for LS ELECTRIC in transformers, it did not come from this filing; we looked for it, and the closest thing on offer is a domestic share of a different product.

Two other disclosures are worth having, because both are company-stated and checkable:

  • Data-centre revenue, company-disclosed: “approximately ₩546.8bn arose in 2025 related to data centres” — $405M, or 11.0% of consolidated FY2025 revenue. That is the honest size of the AI-data-centre exposure everyone is buying.
  • Export recognition: Korea’s Trade Day awards — a $700M export tower in 2023, a $900M export tower in 2024.

So: a dominant domestic incumbent, a genuine and fast-growing US position, and no disclosed share in the product the global narrative rests on. The 11.0% data-centre figure is the number to anchor on, and it came from a paragraph in a Korean-language filing, not a press release. For how the same kind of gap shows up across the Korean power complex, see our decode of KEPCO KPS.

📈 Is the Business Getting Better or Worse?

Better on every headline line — revenue up 32.7% and net profit up 74.5% in H1 2026 — but the improvement is thinner than it looks, because gross margin fell and the gap was closed by overhead leverage and a lower tax rate.

Consolidated FY2023 FY2024 FY2025 H1 2026
Revenue $3,132M $3,371M $3,677M $2,187M
Operating profit $240M $289M $316M $226M
Operating margin 7.66% 8.56% 8.59% 10.33%
Net profit (total) $154M $179M $211M $174M
EPS, post-split basis ₩1,405 ₩1,615 ₩1,929 ₩1,600
Total equity $1,277M $1,400M $1,586M $1,629M

H1 2026 is six months; the FY columns are twelve. Do not annualise the H1 column without saying so. “Net profit (total)” includes non-controlling interests. FY2023 EPS shown on the post-split basis is the reported ₩7,023 divided by 5, for comparability; the company’s own restatement covers FY2024–25 only. FY2024 and FY2025 revenue, operating profit, net profit and equity are converted from the exact filed won amounts (FY2025 revenue ₩4,965,798,552,980; operating profit ₩426,407,143,017; net profit ₩284,256,733,172; equity ₩2,141,298,852,376); FY2023 and H1 2026 are converted from the filed figures at the same rate. Source: DART annual report FY2025 (rcpNo 20260318001243) and half-year report H1 2026 (rcpNo 20260814003088). Converted at ₩1,350.36/$1.

Now the decomposition, which is where the story is:

Six months to 30 June H1 2025 H1 2026 Change
Revenue $1,650M $2,187M +32.74%
Gross margin 21.68% 21.40% −0.28pp
SG&A as % of revenue 12.88% 11.07% −1.81pp
Operating margin 8.80% 10.33% +1.53pp
Effective tax rate 28.25% 24.77% −3.48pp
Net profit growth — — +74.45%

Source: DART half-year report H1 2026, consolidated statement of comprehensive income, cumulative six-month columns (rcpNo 20260814003088). Percentage-point changes computed by us from the filed figures.

Read down that table and the cascade is clear: operating profit grew 55.7%, pre-tax profit 65.6%, net profit 74.5%. Each step amplifies the one before — not because the business got better at each level, but because non-operating items and a 3.48-point lower tax rate stacked on top. The operating engine grew 55.7%; the 74.5% headline is that plus tax.

And the gross-margin line is the one that should stop a bull. If extra-high-voltage transformers were genuinely scarce and LS ELECTRIC were pricing accordingly, gross margin would rise. It fell, slightly, on 32.7% more revenue. Every basis point of the operating-margin improvement came from the denominator.

🔍 Who Is LS ELECTRIC’s Biggest Customer? Its Own American Subsidiary

LS ELECTRIC AMERICA INC. — a company LS ELECTRIC owns — accounted for 41.7% of power-infrastructure segment sales in 2026 year-to-date, up from 31.2% in FY2025, and it is the named counterparty on every single one of the seven US supply contracts LS ELECTRIC has disclosed since March 2025. This is the most consequential thing in the filings and it does not appear in English anywhere.

Start with the customer table the company publishes for its power-infrastructure sub-segment:

Power-infrastructure customer FY2025 2026 YTD
LS ELECTRIC AMERICA INC. (own subsidiary) 31.2% 41.7%
LG Energy Solution 4.6% 8.5%
Samsung SDI 7.4% 7.6%
KAPES (HVDC joint venture) — 4.9%
Korea Electric Power (KEPCO) 5.1% 2.7%
Samsung E&C America 2.2% —
All others 49.5% 34.6%

Percentages of cumulative power-infrastructure sub-segment revenue for the stated period, as disclosed. Each column is the filing’s complete named list and sums to 100.0%: the FY2025 column names five counterparties plus “others”, the 2026 column names five plus “others” — a dash means the counterparty was not among the named five in that period, not that sales were zero. Source: DART annual report FY2025 (rcpNo 20260318001243) and half-year report H1 2026 (rcpNo 20260814003088), “principal customers and sales mix”.

Note what has happened to KEPCO. Korea’s national utility — the customer every foreign reader assumes is the anchor of a Korean grid-equipment business — has gone from 5.1% to 2.7% of power-infrastructure sales. If you want to understand how KEPCO’s own supply chain works, our decode of KEPCO KPS, the utility’s maintenance contractor, sits on the other side of the same meter.

Now the contracts. Korean issuers must file a “single sales/supply contract” disclosure when a deal passes a size threshold, and those filings name the counterparty. Here is every US one since March 2025, in the dollars the filings themselves state, excluding VAT as the filings themselves specify:

PO date Project as named in the filing Value (ex-VAT) Contract period ends
17 Mar 2025 Big Tech Data Center — power supply system $111.7M 27 Oct 2025
7 Jul 2025 Renewable generation — EHV transformers $102.5M 9 Feb 2028
7 Nov 2025 Big Tech Data Center, 2nd tranche (raised from $91.9M on 1 Dec 2025) $131.8M 1 Apr 2026
25 Nov 2025 North American investor-owned utility — renewables, EHV transformers $312.0M 15 Oct 2029
10 Apr 2026 North American hyperscale data centre — switchgear, distribution transformers $115.0M 31 Dec 2026
28 Apr 2026 Bloom Energy fuel-cell data-centre power equipment $216.5M 29 Mar 2027
21 Aug 2026 Big Tech Data Center — power equipment (amended up from 8 Jun 2026) $165.7M 30 Jan 2027
Total Counterparty on all seven: LS ELECTRIC AMERICA Inc. $1,155.2M —

Values are each filing’s own stated USD amount, explicitly “VAT excluded”; we have not re-converted them. An earlier $62.2M tranche of the Big Tech project is disclosed only by cross-reference and is excluded to avoid double-counting — the November 2025 filing states the project’s cumulative total as $173,960,169, which is exactly $62,242,369 + $111,717,800. Sources: DART rcpNo 20250318800092, 20250708800087, 20251201800009, 20251126800086, 20260413800743, 20260429800110, 20260824800095.

Every one of those filings describes the same structure in almost identical words: LS ELECTRIC AMERICA Inc. won the end-customer project, and LS ELECTRIC the parent is supplying it. The end customers appear only in the narrative — Bloom Energy by name, otherwise “a North American super-large investor-owned utility”, “a global hyperscaler”, “Big Tech”.

Three consequences a foreign investor should hold onto:

  • These are transfer-priced intercompany purchase orders, and they are eliminated on consolidation. The $1.16bn does not add to consolidated revenue at that value. It is the amount the parent bills its own subsidiary — which is exactly why the elimination line grew from 18.5% to 35.5% of consolidated revenue.
  • The consolidated “no customer above 10%” statement and the parent-only accounts contradict each other, correctly. The separate (parent-only) statements disclose one customer at 22.62% of standalone revenue in FY2025 — $580M, up from 12.13% and $279M a year earlier — so revenue from that single counterparty more than doubled. The filing anonymises it as “Company A”. The related-party note in the same document shows the only counterparty of that magnitude is LS ELECTRIC Americas Holdings at $605M of goods and services. That identification is our inference from the size, not a statement in the filing — but the next-largest related party is $68M, an order of magnitude smaller, and LS ELECTRIC’s holding in Americas Holdings is 100%. Total related-party sales were $886M, or 34.6% of standalone revenue. (Won amounts as filed: ₩783.3bn, ₩377.0bn, ₩817.3bn and ₩1,196.9bn.)
  • You cannot verify end demand from the parent’s numbers. A purchase order from your own distributor tells you the distributor expects to sell; it does not tell you it has. The place that shows up, if it shows up, is inventory and receivables — and both grew faster than revenue in H1 2026 (receivables +43.0%, inventory +32.9%, against annualised revenue growth of 19.0%).

The fair reading, not the cynical one. Routing US sales through a US entity is ordinary and sensible: American utilities and hyperscalers want a domestic counterparty, local certification and local warranty service. LS ELECTRIC set that structure up in 2022, before the boom. There is corroborating evidence the orders are real — customer advances (contract liabilities) doubled in six months, from $307M to $651M, and someone paying deposits is not a bookkeeping entry. The point is narrower and it still matters: the headline dollar figures Korean media report as “LS ELECTRIC wins a $312M US order” are intercompany POs at transfer prices, and they are not the same thing as consolidated revenue.

🏭 Are the Transformer Plants Sold Out? Its Own Filing Says 66–74%

No. In the six months to June 2026 LS ELECTRIC’s extra-high-voltage transformer plant at Busan ran at 69.9% of capacity, its Cheongju No.2 plant — EHV gas-insulated switchgear and transformers — at 66.5%, and subsidiary LS Power Solution’s Ulsan EHV plant at 73.7%. The company publishes these numbers itself, in a table almost nobody reads.

Plant Main products Available Actual Utilisation
Cheongju No.1 Low/high-voltage devices, meters 151,822 h 146,400 h 96.4%
Cheongju No.2 Switchgear, EHV GIS, transformers, rail 74,637 h 49,613 h 66.5%
Busan EHV transformers, HVDC valves 100,695 h 70,376 h 69.9%
Cheonan PLCs, inverters, automation 43,916 h 33,783 h 76.9%
LS Power Solution, Ulsan EHV transformers, pad-mounted — — 73.7%
LS Power Solution, Busan Distribution transformers — — 62.7%

Six months to 30 June 2026. The company states its own caveat and we carry it: for order-based (make-to-order) divisions, precise utilisation cannot be measured, so the figure is a simple calculation of output against in-house capacity on a labour-hours-input basis. The two LS Power Solution lines are computed on won output against won capacity, not hours, so they are not strictly comparable to the hours-based lines above them. Source: DART half-year report H1 2026, “production capacity, output and utilisation” (rcpNo 20260814003088).

Two readings are possible and the filing supports the kinder one. Capacity is being added faster than it is being filled: Busan’s stated capacity in H1 2026, annualised, is roughly 82% above its FY2025 full-year figure, and Ulsan’s about 56% above — consistent with the ₩100.8bn Busan No.2 building that only completed in October 2025. [Those annualisation figures are our estimate, on three assumptions: that we can double a six-month capacity figure, that capacity is spread evenly through the year, and — for Busan and the LS Power Solution plants, whose capacity the filing states in won rather than hours — that won capacity is a fair proxy for physical capacity, which it is not if product mix or price moved. The utilisation percentages themselves are the company’s, not ours.] A plant that came online nine months ago running at 70% is a plant filling up, not a plant without demand.

But that is precisely why “sold out” is the wrong frame. The constraint on LS ELECTRIC’s transformer revenue in H1 2026 was not capacity. It had roughly 30% of its EHV transformer capacity idle at the same time as its order book grew 38.5%. That combination is the opposite of a pricing-power story, and it is consistent with the gross margin falling rather than rising.

One more line in the same table deserves a mention, because it cuts against the diversification narrative: annualised, the Cheonan automation plant’s capacity shrank about 18% versus FY2025. The company is not building out automation. It is building out transformers.

📋 What Is Actually in the Order Book — and On What Basis?

$6.66bn (₩8,989.4bn), summed across seven separate legal entities as of 30 June 2026 — and LS ELECTRIC never publishes a single consolidated backlog figure, so every number you see quoted is somebody’s choice of which entities to add up.

This is the part of a Korean filing where foreign analysis most often goes wrong, because the backlog disclosure has five independent axes stacked on top of each other: gross orders versus delivered versus remaining; consolidated versus parent-only; current-period versus cumulative; VAT-inclusive versus not; and which segments are in scope. Miss any one and the number changes. We have written up the same problem in Hanwha Aerospace’s order book, where the axes were also unlabelled.

Entity Scope Carried in New orders Delivered Closing backlog
LS ELECTRIC (parent) Power T&D $3,621.4M $2,539.5M $1,058.9M $5,102.1M
LS ELECTRIC (parent) Rail $85.4M $14.9M $30.6M $69.6M
LS ELECTRIC (parent) Automation $7.3M $13.5M $8.9M $12.0M
LS e-Mobility Solution EV relays $851.7M $106.6M $56.4M $901.9M
LS Power Solution Transformers $163.5M $317.5M $53.3M $427.7M
LS ELECTRIC Vietnam Switchgear $33.2M $84.7M $46.7M $71.2M
LS Metal / LS Energy Solutions / LS Thira Utech Tube, ESS, MES $42.9M $74.8M $45.1M $72.5M
Sum of disclosed entities — $4,805.4M $3,151.5M $1,299.9M $6,657.0M

Six months to 30 June 2026. "Carried in" is backlog brought forward from 2025; "Delivered" is the filing’s 기납품액. Every one of the ten bridges in the filing closes exactly — carried in + new orders − delivered = closing backlog, to the won, in all ten. We checked all ten by hand. After converting to dollars and rounding each cell to $0.1M, four of the rows above differ from their own bridge by $0.1M (Power T&D, Rail, Automation and the LS Metal group line); that is display rounding, not a discrepancy in the filing. The total row closes. The filing gives these as seven separate per-entity tables and provides no consolidated total; the sum row is ours, and it does not eliminate orders placed between group companies, so it is not a consolidated backlog. Source: DART half-year report H1 2026, "order status" (rcpNo 20260814003088). Converted from the filing’s 억원 units at ₩1,350.36/$1 and rounded to $0.1M.

Four things to be careful about, all of which we hit while building that table:

  • “Delivered” is not a backlog decline. The 기납품액 column is work completed and handed over — normal progress, and the mechanism by which backlog becomes revenue. Reading it as a cancellation is a mistake we have made before and it produces a number that is wildly wrong.
  • The VAT basis of the backlog is not stated. That matters because at least two large domestic HVDC contracts inside it say in their own filings that the value is VAT-inclusive: the ₩561.0bn ($415M) East Coast–East Seoul converter deal, and the ₩212.6bn ($157M) East Coast–Sin-Gapyeong converter station, whose filing states plainly that “the contract value is an amount inclusive of value-added tax.” Strip 10% out of the first and it is ₩510.0bn ($378M) — a ₩51bn ($38M) difference on one line item, and that ex-VAT figure is our own division, not a number the filing prints. The UK Widow Hill battery contract is worse: GBP 74,232,000 “including 20% VAT”, or GBP 61,860,000 without. We cannot tell you how much of the $6.66bn is VAT, and neither can the filing.
  • The parent’s order book covers only about two-thirds of the parent’s revenue. Parent deliveries of $1,098M in H1 2026 against parent revenue of $1,651M implies roughly 66.5% came through the order book (₩1,483.3bn against ₩2,230.0bn as filed); the rest is catalogue product sold through distributors, which never appears as backlog at all. Backlog is not a forecast of total revenue.
  • Nothing in the order book is EHV-transformer-specific. EHV transformers sit inside the parent’s “Power T&D” line and inside LS Power Solution’s $420M. If you have seen a figure for LS ELECTRIC’s extra-high-voltage transformer backlog specifically, it did not come from this filing — we looked, and it is not disclosed.

The company’s own delivery dates have moved — repeatedly

Here is a dataset that exists only in Korean. Korean issuers must file an amendment when a disclosed contract’s terms change, and the amendment must state the reason and print the old value beside the new one. Of the 23 supply-contract filings LS ELECTRIC made between January 2024 and September 2026, ten were amendments. We read all ten: seven changed the contract period, two changed the contract value, and one changed payment terms. The result is a public record of the company’s own schedule moving — and one contract still in progress, which predates that window, has moved further than anything inside it.

Contract Original end Now Slip
East Coast–Sin-Gapyeong HVDC converter station (via KAPES) 31 Dec 2021 30 Jun 2027 +66 months (5.5 years), in two steps — still in progress
Widow Hill BESS, Burnley, UK 31 Mar 2025 28 Feb 2027 +23 months, in two steps
Egypt monorail power & distribution (via Bombardier) 20 Oct 2025 19 Aug 2027 +22 months
BlueOval SK battery plant, Glendale KY 31 Jan 2024 28 Feb 2025 +13 months, and value cut 18.4%

Sin-Gapyeong: contracted 16 Jan 2018 with KAPES, original end date 31 Dec 2021; amended to 30 Jun 2025 on 4 Mar 2021 (rcpNo 20210304800525, reason “change of contract end date”), then to 30 Jun 2027 on 27 Oct 2023 (rcpNo 20231027800222), which also raised the value from ₩176,550,000,000 to ₩212,580,382,000 and states the value is VAT-inclusive. It is listed as a contract in progress in the FY2025 annual report. Both Sin-Gapyeong amendments predate January 2024, so they sit outside the window used for the 23-filing / 10-amendment count above. BlueOval SK: value revised from $72,227,389 to $58,971,079 on 13 Dec 2024, at the original contract-date exchange rate. Sources: DART rcpNo 20251211800280 (Widow Hill), 20251017800268 (Egypt), 20241213801356 (BlueOval SK), plus the FY2025 annual report’s contracts-in-progress table (rcpNo 20260318001243).

The honest counterpoint, stated with its limits: none of the 2025–26 US data-centre or transformer POs has yet been amended for a date slip. Their end dates stand as originally filed. One of them was amended — the Bloom Energy fuel-cell order, on 14 May 2026 — but only to record that an advance payment now exists; the end date did not move (rcpNo 20260514800292). The slips are concentrated in EPC and infrastructure work, where LS ELECTRIC depends on someone else’s permitting and civil works.

But look at what the Sin-Gapyeong line does to the comfortable version of that argument. HVDC converter equipment is not adjacent to the bull case — it is the bull case, the product group the GE Vernova localisation MOU and the Busan valve line are built around. That contract’s completion date has moved by five and a half years and it is still open. So “EPC slips, equipment doesn’t” is not a distinction this company’s own filings support.

And the US orders are young. The oldest is March 2025; the longest-dated runs to October 2029. On four of the seven, less than a year has elapsed. “Not yet amended” is a statement about elapsed time, not about risk profile — and the amendment record is the only place you will ever see the difference.

💰 What Do You Actually Pay for LS ELECTRIC Today?

₩212,000 a share, a $23.55bn market capitalisation, and 109.9× FY2025 earnings — which makes it both the least profitable and by far the most expensive of Korea’s three large listed power-equipment makers.

LS ELECTRIC (010120) As of 22 Sep 2026
Close $157 (₩212,000)
Market capitalisation $23.55bn (₩31.80tn)
Shares outstanding 150,000,000
52-week range, closes, split-adjusted ₩54,600 – ₩318,500 (7 May 2026)
From the 52-week closing high −33.4%
YTD 2026 / 1-year, split-adjusted +130.4% / +261.8%
P/E, FY2025 (price ÷ disclosed EPS) 109.9×
P/B, FY2025 owners’ equity 15.36×
Dividend per share / yield ₩600 post-split equivalent / 0.28%

Market data (source: Korea Exchange Open API, settled session of 22 Sep 2026). Close × shares reconciles to market capitalisation exactly. The 52-week range is on a closing basis, with pre-13-April closes divided by 5 — intraday extremes were wider (the 7 May 2026 session traded as high as ₩335,000), so a range you read elsewhere may not match ours. Note the low is from a year ago: this is a 5.8× spread. Dividend is the FY2025 declared ₩3,000 per pre-split share restated to the post-split count. Valuation ratios are computed by us.

Which EPS, and why it matters here more than anywhere else. P/E is the 22 September close divided by the company’s own disclosed FY2025 basic EPS of ₩1,929 — the post-split restatement printed in the H1 2026 half-year report (rcpNo 20260814003088). It has to be that one, not the ₩9,647 in the March 2026 annual report (rcpNo 20260318001243): today’s share price is post-split, and pairing a post-split price with a pre-split EPS understates the multiple by exactly five times. Korean EPS is disclosed on an owners’-interest basis, so P/B is put on the same basis, using owners’ equity of ₩2,069,766,351,526 at 31 December 2025; on total equity including non-controlling interests it is 14.85×.

Now the comparison that makes the case.

Company Market cap FY2025 revenue FY2025 op. margin P/E P/Sales
LS ELECTRIC (010120) $23.55bn $3.68bn 8.59% 109.9× 6.40×
HD Hyundai Electric (267260) $19.06bn $3.02bn 24.40% 35.1× 6.31×
Hyosung Heavy Industries (298040) $20.03bn $4.42bn 12.52% 52.0× 4.53×
Iljin Electric (103590) $2.70bn $1.52bn 7.40% 35.1× 1.78×
LS Corp (006260) — the holding company $7.54bn $23.60bn 3.30% 33.0× 0.32×

Market capitalisations and closes: Korea Exchange (KRX) Open API, settled closes of 22 Sep 2026 — LS ELECTRIC ₩212,000, HD Hyundai Electric ₩714,000, Hyosung Heavy ₩2,901,000, Iljin Electric ₩76,500, LS Corp ₩326,500; all five reconcile close × shares to market cap exactly. Revenue and operating margin: each company’s FY2025 consolidated DART filing, via DART’s full financial-statement API. P/E is each company’s close divided by its own disclosed FY2025 basic earnings per share, so every multiple here is one a reader can reproduce from the figure the company itself printed: ₩1,929 for LS ELECTRIC (its post-split restatement — see the note under the table above), ₩20,354 for HD Hyundai Electric, ₩55,832 for Hyosung Heavy, ₩2,179 for Iljin Electric and ₩9,903 for LS Corp. Korean EPS is disclosed on an owners’-interest basis, so all five multiples are too — which is why LS Corp, a holding company whose group profit largely belongs to the minority holders of its subsidiaries, looks more expensive here (33.0×) than it would on a whole-group earnings basis. Comparability checked, not assumed: 267260, 298040 and 103590 had no change in share count over two years; 010120 had the 1:5 split; LS Corp cancelled 3.11% of its shares. We have not annualised any H1 2026 figure here, because we could not verify all five peers’ half-year profit on the same basis. Converted at ₩1,350.36/$1.

The single line to take away: the market pays almost exactly the same multiple of sales for LS ELECTRIC as for HD Hyundai Electric — 6.40× versus 6.31× — but HD Hyundai Electric converts 24.40% of those sales into operating profit and LS ELECTRIC converts 8.59%, a 2.84× gap in margin. On FY2025 earnings that is a 3.1× valuation gap in LS ELECTRIC’s disfavour. If you want the other side of that trade read from the same filings, we decoded HD Hyundai Electric’s backlog and its 0% US dumping margin and Hyosung Heavy’s two-sized order book separately.

The bull rebuttal is legitimate and you should weigh it: trailing FY2025 is stale. LS ELECTRIC’s H1 2026 net profit grew 74.5%, and doubling the company’s disclosed H1 2026 EPS of ₩1,600 gives roughly 66.3× [our estimate, six months doubled]. That is a large improvement and still nearly double HD Hyundai Electric’s FY2025 multiple. For the gap to be justified, LS ELECTRIC’s margins have to converge on its peers’ — which brings you straight back to a gross margin that fell and EHV plants at 66–74%.

🏷️ Which LS Ticker Are You Actually Buying?

Only 010120 is LS ELECTRIC, the operating company that makes grid equipment; 006260 is LS Corp, the holding company that owns 48.46% of it and also owns the cable and metals businesses. They are different securities with different economics, and they are easy to confuse because both are “LS”.

Name Ticker What it is
LS ELECTRIC KRX 010120 The grid-equipment and automation maker in this article. Formerly LS산전 / LS Industrial Systems until March 2020.
LS Corp KRX 006260 The holding company. Owns 48.46% of LS ELECTRIC plus LS Cable & System, LS MnM and others. FY2025 revenue $23.60bn at a 3.30% operating margin.
LS Power Solution not listed The 51%-owned transformer subsidiary, formerly KOC Electric. Consolidated into 010120.
LS ELECTRIC AMERICA / Americas Holdings not listed The US sales entities. Wholly owned, and the counterparty on the US contracts above.
Unrelated “LS” companies — There are US brands using “LS” in electrical and industrial markets with no connection to this group. Korean group companies use the 엘에스 / LS prefix; check the KRX code, not the name.
American depositary receipt none LS ELECTRIC has no ADR. Buying it means buying the Korean line in won — see our guide to Korean share prices in USD and how foreign investors access them.

One search note, because it will waste your time otherwise: the English word “transformer” collides with a film and toy franchise, so generic queries about Korean transformer makers return cartoons. Search for power transformer, substation, switchgear or grid equipment instead.

The split that will break your spreadsheet

On 5 February 2026 the board approved a 1-for-5 face-value split, cutting par value from ₩5,000 to ₩1,000. Shareholders approved it on 26 March, it took effect on 10 April 2026, trading was suspended 8–10 April, and the new shares listed on 13 April 2026. Shares outstanding went from 30,000,000 to 150,000,000. The stated purpose was to expand the float — relevant if you care about index eligibility and liquidity screens, which we cover in our piece on how Korea’s index constituents get picked.

Here is the trap, and the company’s own filings demonstrate it. LS ELECTRIC’s FY2025 earnings per share is printed as ₩9,647 in its March 2026 annual report and as ₩1,929 in its August 2026 half-year report. Both are correct — the second restates the first onto the post-split share count (₩9,647 ÷ 5 = ₩1,929.4). But if your data source mixes filings, or splices an unadjusted price series across 13 April, you will produce numbers that are wrong by a factor of five. The raw close went from ₩718,000 in late March to ₩212,000 in September, which looks like a 70% collapse and was in fact a gain. We know because we walked into a version of this ourselves while researching this article; the reliable method is to compute returns from market capitalisation, or to divide every pre-13-April price by exactly 5.

🌏 Is Foreign Money Buying or Selling LS ELECTRIC?

Buying, in all three windows we can measure — but the 20-session figure is larger than the 60-session figure, which means the 40 sessions before late August were net selling, and four-fifths of the recent buying happened on three days.

LS ELECTRIC (010120), window to 22 Sep 2026 Dates Foreign net shares Foreign net value Institutional net shares
5 sessions 16–22 Sep 2026 +385,891 +$60.4M not reported — see note
20 sessions 26 Aug – 22 Sep 2026 +921,435 +$147.5M −46,208
60 sessions 29 Jun – 22 Sep 2026 +484,633 +$45.6M −328,680

Our own database of settled Korea Exchange closes and daily investor flows, windows ending with the settled session of 22 Sep 2026. Method: each day’s net share count multiplied by that day’s close, then summed, then converted at ₩1,350.36/$1 — an approximation, not execution prices. We are deliberately not reporting the 5-session institutional figure: its sign flips depending on whether the window ends 22 or 23 September, so it is an artefact of one session rather than a fact about the stock. Our flow history for this name begins 18 June 2026, so 60 sessions is near the practical maximum depth — longer windows are not available.

The discipline here matters more than the numbers. All three foreign windows are positive, so “foreigners are buying LS ELECTRIC” survives the multi-window test — which is not something we can usually say. But look at the arithmetic: 20 sessions of +921,435 shares inside 60 sessions of +484,633 means the earlier 40 sessions were net selling of roughly 436,802 shares. And the 20-session total is not a trend either: three sessions — 27 August (+283,435), 18 September (+237,875) and 9 September (+219,206) — account for 80.4% of it. Strip those three out and the other 17 sessions net to +180,919 shares — about 10,600 a session against average daily volume of 470,010 over the same window, or roughly 2% of a day’s trading. That is three repricing events, not accumulation.

Institutions went the other way over both longer windows. We would not build a thesis on that: Korean pension money sells most large caps most weeks, so an institutional net-sell figure needs a peer group before it means anything. For why these flows move Korean prices at all, see how foreign and institutional flows move Korean stocks, and our weekly Foreign Flow Watch.

🏛️ Who Controls LS ELECTRIC, and What Do Minority Holders Get?

LS Corp, the listed holding company, owns 48.46% — and minority holders get a 0.28% dividend yield and a treasury-share programme that has never cancelled a single share.

As of 31 December 2025 the register showed LS Corp with 14,539,000 shares, 48.46%, and the National Pension Service with 2,814,746 shares, 9.38%. The largest-shareholder group including affiliated persons came to 49.33%. There were 108,607 small shareholders holding 40.10% between them. The largest shareholder has not changed during the disclosure period. The board is nine directors — four executive and five outside, so outside directors are a majority. Chairman Koo Ja-kyun’s FY2025 compensation was $5.3M (₩7,151mn). (Source: DART annual report FY2025, rcpNo 20260318001243.)

On shareholder returns, three facts and one quotation.

  • The dividend is small and the company says it intends to keep it that way. FY2025 declared ₩3,000 per pre-split share — ₩600 post-split, a 0.28% yield at ₩212,000 — totalling $66.1M (₩89,215mn) at a 31.1% consolidated payout ratio. The dividend-policy section states that rather than expanding cash dividends in the short term and depleting investment resources, the company will “manage the payout ratio at a stable level” while pursuing strategic investment. That is a direct statement of intent, and it is the opposite of what Korea’s Value-Up programme asks for.
  • No share has ever been cancelled — and that is a cumulative, since-inception fact, not a one-year one. The FY2025 annual report’s “total number of shares” table (rcpNo 20260318001243) has a section for shares retired since incorporation, with lines for capital reduction, retirement out of profits, redemption of redeemable shares and other. All four read zero, and shares issued equals shares outstanding at 30,000,000 on a pre-split basis. Meanwhile the treasury holding fell from 298,739 to 261,509 shares in FY2025, and the cancellation column of the acquisition-and-disposal table is also blank: all 37,230 shares went to staff — 3,290 on RSU vesting, 2,140 as executive long-term incentive, 31,800 for “employee ownership motivation”. The pattern repeated in 2026 with two fresh disposal decisions: 22,581 shares at ₩844,000 (pre-split) on 26 March (rcpNo 20260326001137, ₩19,058,364,000) and 32,520 shares at ₩187,700 (post-split) to 3,252 employees on 15 July (rcpNo 20260715000510, ₩6,104,004,000). Treasury stock here is a compensation currency, not a return of capital. That distinction is central to the Korea Discount debate: a buyback that parks shares for later reissue to insiders does not shrink the share count.
  • One genuine governance improvement. FY2025 is the first year LS ELECTRIC set the dividend record date after the dividend was decided and disclosed — board resolution 5 February 2026, record date 27 February, AGM approval 26 March. Its own table marks dividend predictability as provided for FY2025 and not provided for FY2024 or FY2023. Korean investors historically had to buy before knowing the dividend. That is fixed here, and it is a real, dated, verifiable improvement.

One structural note for anyone weighing 010120 against 006260: the holding company trades at 0.32× sales and 33.0× its own disclosed earnings per share against the operating company’s 6.40× and 109.9×. A holding-company discount of that width is normal in Korea and is not by itself an arbitrage — LS Corp’s earnings are a blend of cable, metals and electric, most of the group’s profit accrues to minority holders of the subsidiaries rather than to LS Corp’s own shareholders, and LS Corp’s minorities do not control the dividend policy of any of them.

⚠️ The Bear Case

  • The valuation needs a margin story the filings do not yet support. At 109.9× FY2025 earnings and ~66.3× on annualised H1 2026 [our estimate], LS ELECTRIC is priced above HD Hyundai Electric while earning an 8.59% operating margin against its 24.40%. The H1 gross margin fell from 21.68% to 21.40%. If pricing power were arriving, that line would move first, and it moved the wrong way.
  • This article’s own core finding cuts both ways — and the bear side is that we cannot verify end demand. We argue the intercompany routing through LS ELECTRIC AMERICA is the key to reading the numbers. The uncomfortable corollary is that nobody outside the company can audit it: 41.7% of power-infrastructure sales and $1.16bn of disclosed contracts sit with a subsidiary at transfer prices we never see — and the North American revenue growth everyone quotes (+44.5%) is stated before those intercompany sales are eliminated, by the filing’s own note. If US project timelines slip, that shows up first as parent-company inventory and receivables — and receivables already grew 43.0% against 19.0% annualised revenue growth.
  • Earnings quality: the 74.5% net-profit growth is not 74.5% of operating improvement. Operating profit grew 55.7%; the rest came from non-operating items and a tax rate 3.48 points lower. Separately, non-controlling interests swung from +₩3.5bn profit in FY2024 to −₩2.4bn in FY2025 and −₩4.2bn in H1 2026, which means reported EPS flatters the group — FY2025 profit attributable to owners was 100.8% of total group profit. The partly-owned subsidiaries, including the 51%-owned transformer business, are losing money for their minority partners.
  • Governance: the payout is minimal by policy, and treasury stock goes to employees. A 0.28% yield, a stated intention to hold the payout ratio stable rather than raise it, zero cancellations ever, and a 48.46% holding-company parent. Nothing here is illegal or unusual in Korea — it is simply not a shareholder-return story, and anyone buying it as a Value-Up candidate is buying the wrong thesis.
  • The balance sheet is financing the growth. Liabilities grew 34.5% in six months against 2.7% growth in total equity (2.9% on the owners’-interest line — we use total equity here to match the equity row in the table above); debt-to-equity went from 131.5% to 172.1%; net debt rose 38.9% to $596M. Separately, hedging cost $77.8M (₩105.1bn) of other comprehensive income in H1 2026 — the weaker won that flatters reported revenue is simultaneously hitting equity through currency forwards, and derivative liabilities nearly quadrupled, up 3.80×, to $149M (₩201.1bn).
  • The order book’s basis is genuinely unknowable in places, and the schedule record is worse than it first looks. The filing gives no consolidated backlog, no VAT basis, and no EHV-transformer breakout. Its two largest domestic HVDC contracts are VAT-inclusive by their own admission. And the amendment record shows an HVDC converter-station contract whose completion date has moved 66 months and is still open, two more that slipped 22–23 months, and one whose value was cut 18.4%. HVDC is the product group the bull case is built on.

📚 Lingo Check

Term What it means 한국어
order backlog bridge The four-column identity every Korean order-status table follows: backlog carried forward + new orders − delivered = closing backlog. If it does not reconcile, something is mislabelled. 수주잔고
delivered amount Work completed and handed to the customer in the period. It reduces backlog as normal progress — it is not a cancellation or a lost order. 기납품액
VAT-inclusive contract value Some Korean supply-contract disclosures state the headline value with value-added tax in it, and say so in a footnote. Treating such a figure as revenue overstates it by up to the VAT rate — 10% in Korea, 20% in the UK. 부가세 포함 계약금액
segment revenue before elimination Korean segment tables report each segment including sales to other group companies, then reconcile with one negative line. Individual segments can therefore exceed 100% of consolidated revenue. 연결조정 전 부문매출
face-value stock split A split executed by reducing par value, common in Korea. Filings disclose the effective date and the new-share listing date separately, and unadjusted price series break at the listing date. 액면분할
capacity utilisation Actual against available production, disclosed per plant in Korean annual and half-year reports. For make-to-order plants the issuer usually states it cannot be measured precisely and gives an input-hours approximation. 가동률
single sales/supply contract disclosure The mandatory DART filing when a contract passes a size threshold. It names the counterparty, the value, the relationship (subsidiary, affiliate, unrelated) and the contract period — and an amendment must be filed when any of those change. 단일판매·공급계약체결
basic EPS, owners’ interest Korean issuers disclose earnings per share on profit attributable to the parent’s shareholders, not to the whole consolidated group. Divide a share price by it and you get a P/E a reader can reproduce from the filing; divide market capitalisation by whole-group profit instead and you get a different number — for a holding company with large minorities, a very different one. 기본주당이익(지배주주지분)
EHV transformer Extra-high-voltage transformer — the large units that step voltage up or down on transmission networks. The scarce, long-lead-time product at the centre of the global grid build-out. 초고압 변압기

🎯 Why It Matters for K-Export Stars

Every figure in this article came from free, public documents that happen to be written in Korean — which is the whole of our edge, and the whole of the reason this analysis does not already exist in English. Nothing here is a scoop or a leak. Every number came from documents any investor on earth can download for free — LS ELECTRIC’s half-year report, its annual report, and 23 contract filings. They are simply in Korean, and they are long.

The wires reported the orders: $312M here, $216.5M there, a growing backlog, a Korean company riding the AI-data-centre build-out. All of that is true. What the wires did not do was open the counterparty field on those filings and notice it says subsidiary seven times out of seven, or scroll to the utilisation table and find the transformer plants at 66–74%, or divide gross profit by revenue and see the margin go backwards, or open the contracts-in-progress table and find an HVDC converter station whose delivery date has moved five and a half years.

We also want to be honest about what this exercise cost us in error. We nearly published a one-year return of +43% for a stock that actually returned +262%, because an unadjusted price series broke at a stock split. We found and fixed it before publication. That is the entire reason we print our methods, our as-of dates and the things we could not verify: on a topic this heavily narrated, the discipline is the product.

Conclusion

LS ELECTRIC is a genuine beneficiary of the global grid build-out. Its order book grew 38.5% in six months to $6.66bn, its customer advances doubled, its North American revenue grew fast on every basis the filings offer (+44.5% consolidated but before intra-group elimination, +49.9% in the parent-only accounts — neither strips out sales to its own US subsidiary), and it has put real money — ₩100.8bn at Busan — into extra-high-voltage transformer capacity. It is also the clear domestic leader in low- and high-voltage power devices, at a company-estimated 63.8%. None of that is in doubt.

What is in doubt is the price. On its own filings, LS ELECTRIC earns an 8.59% operating margin against HD Hyundai Electric’s 24.40%, runs its EHV plants at 66–74%, saw gross margin fall while revenue grew a third, routes 41.7% of power-infrastructure sales through a subsidiary it owns, pays a 0.28% dividend, has never retired a single share since incorporation — and trades at 109.9× FY2025 earnings, more than three times HD Hyundai Electric’s multiple on the identical basis. It is priced as the purest expression of the Korean transformer trade while being, on the numbers it files itself, the least profitable of the three.

The thesis that would change this is simple and testable: gross margin. If the second-half and FY2026 filings show gross margin rising rather than falling, the capacity fills, and the intercompany revenue converts into consolidated revenue at a better margin, the multiple starts to make sense. Watch that one line. For adjacent reading, see our decodes of KEPCO KPS and Korea’s nuclear export chain, both built the same way — from the filings.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and is not investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Figures are sourced from DART regulatory filings and Korea Exchange market data as of the dates stated and may be superseded by later filings. Market data is as of the settled close of 22 September 2026; prices, market capitalisations and valuation multiples change continuously. Currency conversions use ₩1,350.36/$1, the 22 September 2026 rate, and are indicative. Always conduct your own research and consult a licensed financial adviser before making any investment decision.

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