Hyosung announced Friday it would invest 1 trillion won ($893.3 million) to establish a 300,000-ton polyketone manufacturing plant and a research and development center in Korea’s southeastern industrial city of Ulsan.

The industrial conglomerate and the local government of Ulsan signed a memorandum of understanding on Thursday to jointly work on the development scheduled to be completed in 2021. The 208,000-square-meter site is set at Yongyeon-dong, which is close to another Hyosung plant, and will be capable of producing 300,000 tons of polyketones every year, the company said.

Ulsan will support securing the real estate and handling administrative matters surrounding the plant establishment as well as granting tax benefits to the country’s 24th-largest business enterprise. Hyosung in return will hire local outsourcers and manpower.

The company said that about 500 people will be working at the plant once completed.

Polyketone is a new ecofriendly material developed by Hyosung for the first time in the world. The engineered plastic is known to be more sustainable buy using carbon monoxide as its main monomer. The company will launch mass production later this year at a 50,000-ton plant whose construction began in 2014 near the Yongyeon-dong site.

With the new manufacturing site enhancing the production capability, Hyosung expects to dominate more than 30 percent of the 66 trillion won global engineering plastic market share in the future.

By Bae Ji-sook (baejisook@heraldcorp.com)