Samsung SDI's H1 2026 DART filing (August 14) discloses 73% capacity utilization — 860 million units produced against 1.178 billion unit capacity. The scope is small-battery facilities only: Cheonan and Tianjin consumer cell plants (Edaily, August 14, reporting directly from the filing). The full-year 2025 figure of 50.4% covered the same small-battery scope. The filing provides no utilization figure for medium- and large-format EV or ESS operations.
Samsung SDI's prismatic ESS cells — the product BESS integrators are qualifying — sit in the medium/large category the filing leaves unaddressed. FEOC-compliant supply estimates that incorporate 73% are applying a consumer-cell figure to a format category it does not represent. The small-battery recovery is directionally useful as a consumer electronics demand signal. It carries no information about available capacity at StarPlus or elsewhere in the medium/large footprint.
- Disclosed scope: Small batteries only — Cheonan (Korea) and Tianjin (China) consumer cell plants
- H1 2026 output: 860M units / 1.178B capacity = 73% (DART filing)
- FY 2025 comparator: 1.269B / 2.52B = 50.4%, same small-battery scope
- Medium/large utilization: Not disclosed in the H1 filing
- ESS shipment proxy (Tier 3): 6.4 GWh global ESS in H1 2026 per Battery-Tech Network citing SMM — not company-disclosed, methodology unspecified
- NA ESS share: Fell to 6.1% from 9.7% YoY (CnEVPost, Aug 4)
- Denominator caution: The 84%→50% (2022–2025) series from Seoul Economic Daily may use a broader scope; comparison to 73% requires confirming a common denominator