Hi, I'm
Jinyoung Son
Commercial & customer-facing professional — pricing, cost, and quality in battery and advanced materials.
Ex-LG Chem, now based in the Hudson Valley, New York.
Open to account management, commercial, pricing, and supplier quality roles — remote, U.S.
What I'm looking for
Account Manager · Commercial / Pricing Manager · Cost Analyst · Supplier Quality Engineer
Manufacturing and advanced materials first — but the commercial, cost, and quality toolkit travels to any industry.
Based in the Hudson Valley, NY. Remote roles anywhere in the U.S. preferred.
Authorized to work in the U.S. (EAD) — no employer sponsorship needed.
Bilingual in Korean and English, based in the U.S. — I know how Korean manufacturing organizations work from the inside, and I'm on this side of the ocean.
What I do
I've worked on both sides of manufacturing competitiveness: making sure the product is right, and making sure the business behind it works. Over three and a half years at LG Chem — a global leader in chemical and battery materials — I moved from shop-floor quality assurance to executive-level pricing strategy.
That path gave me an uncommon combination: I can walk a production line and talk IQC/PQC/OQC and supplier quality, then sit down with commercial teams and build the cost and pricing story that wins the deal. What ties it together is competitiveness — quality customers can trust, at a cost the business can sustain.
I've also spent both roles at the customer interface. In quality that meant owning claim response end to end — including face-to-face negotiations abroad when the relationship was worth more than the win. In pricing it meant building the cost logic that had to hold up in front of a customer. Working in Korean and English across Korea-based teams and overseas sites was simply part of the job.
Experience
Pricing & Marketing Strategy Associate
LG Chem · Cathode Materials · Jan 2025 – Apr 2026
- Owned pricing for cathode materials in the EV battery value chain — managing selling price and manufacturing cost together to control contribution margin and gross profit.
- Structured commercial terms on multi-year booked volume (typically 2–3 years), including forward annual price schedules and volume-tiered pricing.
- Priced the conversion fee within a metal-indexed price structure, folding procurement and planning's annual metal-price outlook into each year's selling price.
- Led RFI/RFQ response end to end, with as many as 5–6 live RFQs from different customers at once, including U.S. customers; leadership adopted my pricing analysis on competitive bids that won new program awards.
Spotlight — how this role actually worked, from purpose to lesson:
1Purpose
Prices that win orders and hold margin
- Know what each product truly costs to make — plant by plant, at home and overseas
- Ground every quote and order-intake decision in that number
2Process
Connect the ledger, the market, and the shop floor
- Analyzed manufacturing cost in ERP across all accounting lines — depreciation, labor, SG&A
- Factored competitor pricing intelligence, raw-material supply, tariffs and China VAT into price positioning
- Walked domestic and overseas production sites to tie process structure to cost structure — numbers alone don't tell you why a cost exists
3Result
Strategy leadership could act on
- Product-level pricing strategies and order-intake proposals
- Executive briefings that backed deal decisions with data
4Lesson
What the money seat taught me
- Excel, data analysis, and ERP as everyday working tools
- Judging by the numbers — always in terms of cost structure, revenue, and P&L
- Writing reports decision-makers can actually act on
- Pricing touches every team's money, so communicating with every department was part of the job
Quality Assurance Specialist
LG Chem · Battery Pack Materials · May 2023 – Dec 2024
- Served as the direct customer contact for quality — claim response by email, phone, and on-site — with 3D/8D corrective action reports submitted straight to the customer.
- Negotiated liability and compensation scope on customer claims face-to-face, including overseas travel, settling with minimal loss while keeping the relationship intact.
- Owned the full quality cycle — IQC, PQC, OQC — in a new business development group, and audited supplier quality systems annually.
Spotlight — how this role actually worked, from purpose to lesson:
1Purpose
Ship only lots a customer can trust
- Keep every product inside all COA property specs — spec-in, lot after lot
- When something goes wrong, contain it fast and protect the relationship
2Process
Monitor, contain, dig for the root cause
- Routinely monitored every lot against COA specs, raising inspection frequency whenever values drifted
- On an issue: tracked the affected and at-risk lots and held shipments
- Hunted root causes with quality tests and COA re-inspection — rarely straightforward — then judged whether fixes should carry into future lots
- Closed every issue with a structured 3D/8D report
- Managed suppliers as well — audited their quality systems every year, and when a problem was reported, went on-site to resolve it
3Result
Issues closed, trust kept
- Drifting parameters caught before they became customer claims
- Liability and compensation scope settled with minimal loss to the company — without burning the relationship
- When trust mattered more than the win, negotiated face-to-face, including overseas trips
4Lesson
What the quality seat taught me
- Communicating with customers — and suppliers — when the stakes are high
- Reading data hard enough to find what it is really saying
- Negotiation — balancing today's loss against long-term trust
- An auditor's eye — no formal certification, but enough to judge whether a quality system holds up
Quality Assurance Specialist
LG Chem · Polarizer Film · Oct 2022 – Apr 2023
- Performed outgoing quality control (OQC) for polarizer film products.
- Resolved customer claims through structured 3D and 8D root-cause analysis.
Skills
Education
Konkuk University — B.S. in Mathematics (Seoul, South Korea)
This site is my playground
I built and run sonnyplot.com myself, working with AI — the pages, the live market data widget on the home page, and the automated deploy pipeline behind it. I write about those experiments on the blog (in Korean). A math degree, a quality engineer's habits, and a lot of curiosity about what AI can do.
Get in touch
The best way to reach me is LinkedIn — jinyoung-son — or email me at contact@sonnyplot.com.