sonnyplot.com

Hi, I'm

Jinyoung Son

Cost & quality strategy professional — battery and advanced materials.
Ex-LG Chem, now based in the Hudson Valley, New York.

Open to opportunities in cost management, pricing strategy, quality assurance, and supplier quality

What I'm looking for

Roles

Cost Analyst · Pricing Analyst · Quality Engineer · Supplier Quality Engineer

Industries

Manufacturing first — but the cost-and-quality toolkit travels to any industry.

Location

Based in the Hudson Valley, NY. Remote or hybrid preferred; open to on-site in the NYC metro area and northern New Jersey.

Work status

U.S. work authorization (EAD) in final processing — no employer sponsorship needed.

Edge

Bilingual in Korean and English — a natural bridge for Korean companies' U.S. operations.

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.

Experience

Pricing & Marketing Strategy Associate

LG Chem · Cathode Materials · Jan 2025 – Apr 2026

  • Managed manufacturing cost for cathode materials across multiple overseas production sites, tracking and analyzing cost drivers by plant.
  • Led customer-facing pricing strategy through RFI/RFQ processes, supporting executive decisions with data-driven recommendations.

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
  • Monitored competitor pricing, raw-material supply, tariffs and China VAT, and fed them 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

  • Owned the full quality cycle — IQC, PQC, and OQC — for battery pack materials in a new business development group.
  • Managed raw-material suppliers through supplier quality assurance (SQA); resolved customer claims with structured 3D/8D reports.

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

Cost ManagementPricing StrategyRFI / RFQSupplier Quality (SQA)8D Problem SolvingIQC · PQC · OQCData AnalysisPython

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.