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Category Archives: Business
In a week when the most developed market in the world has not particularly covered itself in glory, after years in the waiting room it was announced this week that Korea would be admitted into the FTSE club of developed markets.
According to the FT (South Korea wins developed-country status, 18 Sept 2008), this could result in a net inflow of $25bn into the Korean stock market as funds which track the global developed market index rebalance their portfolios (while those that track the emerging market index sell out). The Korea Exchange has a slightly more conservative figure – $16bn (Source: Forbes.com).
In the same week, it was announced that HSBC no longer wants to buy KEB - at least not at ...
There was no hope of applying the Chatham House rule at yesterday's talk by HE Dr Jun Kwang-woo, chairman of Korea's Financial Services Commission. With two TV cameras and numerous digital recorders on show, this meeting was firmly on the record.
Reflecting the more formal nature of this meeting, Dr Jun spoke from a prepared text, though there was also a generous amount of time afterwards for Dr Jun to take questions from the floor.
It was a whistle-stop tour for Dr Jun. Earlier in the week he had been at the IOSCO meeting in Paris, where he was appointed Chair of IOSCO's regional committee for Asia. He was only in London for the day and was heading back to Seoul immediately ...
Dr Jun Kwang Woo, the Chairman of the Korean Financial Services Commission, is in Paris and London this week for a range of meetings, including the UK finance minister and the FSA.
He will also be speaking to the Korea Discussion Group at Chatham House on Friday afternoon at 4pm. His subject is Korea's responses to challenges from the global financial markets. The gathering will be chaired by Dr John Llewellyn, Senior Economic Policy Advisor at Lehman Brothers. Interested parties can join the discussion group by pre-registering (details at the bottom of this article). Further background on Dr Jun’s talk:
Developments in international financial markets have brought opportunities for faster growth and expansion. At the same time, developments also mean that the ...
Mad Cows: President Lee’s apology
24-May-08
The following is the full text of President Lee Myung-bak's statement in a live TV broadcast at Cheong Wa Dae on 22 May to address the resumption of U.S. beef imports and ratification of the Korea-U.S. FTA. Courtesy of the Korean Culture and Information Service (KOIS). For those who haven't been following the Mad Cow debate, I'll be adding a series of links at the bottom of this post in due course.
It has been almost three months since I was inaugurated as President. During that period, I have been working hard to live up to the aspirations of the entire Korean people with the idea that, "The economy must be revived without fail." I have been striving all along with ...
Koreans in New Zealand
17-May-08
I had known for a while that New Zealand is a place where Koreans have been travelling – and settling down – for a number of years. At the BFI London Film Festival in 2004 there was a short film entitled Eating Sausage (Zia Mandviwalla, 2004), about Korean immigrants in Auckland; while Bungee Jumping of Their Own (Kim Dae-seung, 2001) features New Zealand as a known tourism destination – at least for adventure sports.
Artist Lee Hye Rim lives in Aukland, while the Lonely Planet advises that the work of Oh Seung Yul can be found at the new art gallery there.
Since I was in Auckland recently on vacation I thought I’d check out evidence of Koreans in New Zealand’s most ...
One of the ideas to surface in the run-up to the Korean elections was that chaebols should once more be permitted to invest in banks. The proposed revision in policy prompted KBS to try to do a brief survey of practices in various markets in relation to rules regarding ownership of banks by non-bank companies. Copy deadlines back in Seoul prevented any really serious research in the UK, but here are the pointers I would have provided.
As readers will be aware, the concern that some people raise when faced with the proposal is that the chaebols will use the banks as their personal "piggy-banks" - that is, the chaebols will use the banks they might own as a cheap source ...
Now comes the hard part
21-Dec-07
The easy bit was to capitalise on disaffection with the Roh regime. Now President-elect Lee has to figure out how to deliver on his election slogan: the 747 economy. So now Lee has to set South Korea on a course where annual GDP growth is 7%, GDP per head is $40,000 per annum, and South Korea is the seventh largest global economy.
That second "7" is the tougher one to achieve, given that it's dependent on the performance of other global economies as well as Korea's, and given also the relentless upward trajectories of the BRIC economies. In order for Korea to move up the league table, other countries have got to move down; and for each faster-growth country that overtakes ...
Thank goodness for that
30-Nov-07
I'm not sure what audience BBC World TV is aimed at, and I'm not sure that the BBC know either, which is why it is so bland. And because the channel is done on a budget, the programmes are in part funded by advertisements, and the content is padded out by trailers and is endlessly repeated -- which is why the advertisements become increasingly mind-numbing.
On a recent holiday, in order to keep up with current affairs, we tuned in to BBC World channel on the hotel cable TV most days. We got to know the advertisements pretty well. An incredibly irritating promotional video for Incredible India ran three or four times an hour; a pastel blue advert for Korean Air ...
A Chuseok-themed marketing campaign
19-Oct-07
US retail banking giant Chase have been aiming to show their cultural awareness. They missed the golden opportunity to launch this marketing campaign at the turn of the lunar Year of the Golden Pig, but have made up for it by running it to coincide with Chuseok.
The deal is this. You have to go in to one of their branches designated as serving the Chinese or Korean community in the US. Apparently Chase has 67 Asian-designated branches, including 31 in the New York tri-state area and others in Arizona, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey and Texas. I'm not sure whether you're barred from this if you're not ethnic Chinese or Korean. Probably, being the US, the diversity police would mean the ...
Busan, hub city?
15-Oct-07
OK, so I didn't make it to PIFF this year. I don't think I'm ever likely to: time away from work is precious, and to be spent with one's beloved. If one's beloved isn't in to sitting in a darkened movie theatre straining to read the subtitles for days on end (and I'm not sure that I am, either), then a week at a film festival is not a good way to use up valuable vacation time. Besides, I have two festivals in London in the comings weeks to look forward to.
Of course, Busan is on my mind at this time of the year because of the festival, but I also have fond feelings towards the place because one or ...
Where next for Samsung and Chelsea?
04-Oct-07
The departure of Jose Mourinho from Chelsea is not good news from the perspective of Samsung's multi-million, multi-year sponsorship deal (which still has a couple of years to run).
I don't pretend to be able to judge Avram Grant's ability to keep the team's performance up -- though an obvious comment would be that the abrupt change at the top could have an unsettling effect on the players. Clearly Samsung gets better value for money the better the team's performance in the league and competitions, but a team's fortunes come and go.
Mourinho's departure brings to an end any hope of a repeat performance of a rather serendipitous sponsorship arrangement, whereby a year or so ago Mourinho could be seen on countless ...
Korea still an emerging market
29-Sep-07
More than 10 years after joining the OECD, South Korea is still an emerging market.
FTSE (the company owned by the Financial Times and the London Stock Exchange) has recently been reviewing the constituent countries in its various global equity indices.
In drawing up the indices, they categorise countries into three lists: Developed, Advanced Emerging, and Secondary Emerging.
In the first list there's the obvious candidates like the USA, Switzerland, Greece, Japan, UK... Hang on. Greece? OK, FTSE have warned Greece that they're on the watch list for relegation into the lower divisions.
In the third division there's Peru, China, India, Russia and others. Pakistan is about to be expelled into the nether regions.
In between, the second division countries are Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, ...
Jackie Choi London showcases new designs
18-Sep-07
Jackie Choi London, the Korean designers whose "Eye" chair was featured on Graham Norton's show, are showing new designs at 100% Design 2007 (Earls Court, 20-24 September).
The sideboard above was inspired by Lucio Fontana and his "Slash" series of works, (example right).
The Choi sisters will also be launching a pewter candelabra (left) in collaboration with British lighting company Innermost.
Meanwhile, at the Portico Rooms in Somerset House, 18-25 September, the Choi sisters will be presenting their project commissioned for Eureka 2007 (part of the London Design Festival): a sofa inspired by the landscape of the Malvern Hills (below).
Links:
100% Design site
Jackie Choi London site
Fontana and spazializmo at the Tate website
British designer boosted by degree faker
08-Sep-07
Alexander McQueen's tops have been flying off the shelves of a trendy Apgujeong department store (at $200 a time) ever since Shin Jeong-ah was papped in JFK wearing this:
McQ can be bought at HANDSOME-SPACE MUE, 93-6 Chungdam-dong, Kangnam, if you're quick.
Source: Chosun
Links: Alexander McQueen website
Watch the two videos below and tell me if you think one was influenced by the other.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojsQ4nLX2BA[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS3W9YOuh5A[/youtube]
The top video is a new TV commercial for a new variant of the chewy sweet formerly known as Opal Fruits. The commercial is produced by London advertising agency TBWA according to Advertolog. Art director Tom Chancellor has the ad on his site.
The bottom video is the creation of video artist June Bum Park. He's been doing work showing people being manipulated by giant hands for at least a couple of years as far as I'm aware. I first saw his work at the presentation of Korean video art shown at the British Museum during the London Korean Festival in 2005. The above work, ...
KEB blow by blow
23-Aug-07
Reports of HSBC's renewed interest in KEB have given me the impetus to resurrect a post which has been work-in-progress for a while. I've been periodically trying to google back in time to reconstruct the whole KEB saga, and yesterday's FT coverage gave a very useful framework on which to build.
So here is another of my collections of links around a particular story, which I'll update as and when I come across more. The chronology and narrative is from the FT. The links are mine, many of them via Tom Coyner.
August 2003 Lone Star agrees to pay Won1,400bn ($1.5bn) to take control of ailing Korea Exchange Bank.
Lone Star to purchase Korean bank today, JoongAng Daily, 27 August 2003
New player in ...
The Grand Culture Project
22-Aug-07
At the SOAS / AKS conference on 26 June, the talk by Kim Hyeon, Associate Professor of Cultural Informatics at the Academy of Korean Studies, had the title "the Korean Wave, Cultural Content and Cultural Informatics".
"What on earth is Cultural Informatics?" I hear you ask. You would not be alone. But read on.
The premise of the thesis runs roughly thus:
Some of the biggest hallyu hits have been Joseon dynasty historical dramas. Take Dae Jang Geum and the King and the Clown. These have been great export earners for Korea, Inc. Wouldn't it be great if you could bottle the formula?
But a brief look at the genesis of the King and the Clown highlights a problem in the lifecycle of a ...
Both BA and KAL get multi-million fines, while equally guilty sneaks Virgin and Lufthansa escape punishment. Whatever, I'll still fly Virgin in preference to BA whenever I can.
Links:
British Airways and Korean Air Lines fined by regulators for price-fixing, International Herald Tribune, 1 August 2007
A press release issued yesterday
THINK LONDON AND SOUTH EAST ENGLAND DEVELOPMENT AGENCY JOIN FORCES IN PROMOTING LONDON AND SOUTH EAST IN KOREA
July 18, 2007
Â
Think London, the foreign direct investment agency for London, and SEEDA, the South East England Development Agency, announced the establishment of their joint representative office based at KOTRA in Seoul, the Korean Trade-Investment Promotion Agency. London and SEEDA's joint representative Mr Seo Young Ho will represent London and the South East of England in an enhanced capacity, attracting and retaining high value foreign direct investment from Korea and supporting SEEDA's Global Partner programme.
Generating a third of the UK's total Gross Value Added (GVA), London and the South East of England have a compelling proposition for Korean companies ...
Round-up of recent business stories
10-Jul-07
Some recent stories I don't want to lose.
Mercer's annual cost of living survey for expats has recently been published. Seoul, last year's number 2, has been pushed to number 3 by London. Moscow stays top of the list. Tokyo is fourth.
Korea is also slipping in the GDP rankings. Bank of Korea data shows that in 2005 Brazil overtook Korea in notional GDP terms, while earlier this year it was reported that Russia and India had also overtaken Korea. Latest World Bank statistics are here.
As if to rub salt in the wounds, Deutsche Borse has launched the DAX Emerging 11 Index, to track the so-called "Next-11" group of emerging market countries, who, after the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and ...
KORUS links
02-Jun-07
The show's not over yet on the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement, but while there's a lull in the proceedings I'm taking the opportunity to post a few links which I'll update as necessary.
1. The text of the draft agreement
The full text - an index of all the pdf documents which make up the individual chapters
Press release containing links to a summary document and specific summaries of the auto and agricultural provisions
2. Coverage from the US perspective
South Korea, U.S. release full text of free trade agreement - International Herald Tribune, 25 May:
Earlier this month, the Bush administration, under pressure from Congressional Democrats, agreed to new trade policy guidelines that will elevate labor and environmental rights to key components in future free ...
Hanwha and Kim Seung-youn links
19-May-07
A lazy post to bring together some of the Hanwha coverage. Interestingly, not many of the bloggers seem to have shown much interest in the story, as far as I can see.
(South Korean police officers carry the seizures after searching at home of Hanwha Group Chairman and CEO Kim Seung-youn in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, May 1, 2007. Police on Tuesday searched the home of the South Korean business tycoon accused of taking part in a sensational revenge attack on bar workers after his son was hurt in a fight in a karaoke pub. (AP Photo/Yonhap, Choi Jae-gu))
One of those Kahoidong fake-hanok-style houses.
Some of the links:
Rough and tumble, Korean style: Donald Kirk, Asia Times, 5 May 2007:
Even as investigators searched ...
JPMorgan Partners the next Lone Star?
23-Apr-07
That's the question posed by the Chosun last week.
The investment partnership formed to acquire a 73% stake of Mando, the Korean car parts maker, was ordered by the National Tax Service to pay $16 million in back taxes on dividends. JPMorgan Partners had a two-thirds share in this partnership. While the investment in Mando, at $446 million back in 2000, is a lot smaller than Lone Star's KEB investment, it's nevertheless substantial.
According to the Chosun, the NTS objects to the fact that the investment is held by a company, Sun Sage, which is established in the Netherlands, a jurisdiction with a favourable double tax treaty with the ROK - as was the case with Lone Star's KEB holding. It appears ...
An answer to Samsung’s profit woes
19-Apr-07
Samsung recently reported lower than anticipated profits for the first quarter of 2007.
"While operating profit came in slightly below market consensus, this shortfall was limited to weaker than expected performance in the semiconductor business," said Lee Keonhyok of Samsung's investor relations department in a telephone conference call. "While not making any excuses, it's fair to say weak performance of semiconductors was reflected by a marketwide decline in DRAM and NAND prices."
Reading through the business-speak, Samsung's lower profits are due to their being exposed to a commodity business. Where the profits are is in the value-added business.
Like red laptops.
I seem to be spending more and more time on my little hobby. And I can't do all my daily posts at work, ...
KORUS FTA to benefit some UK law firms?
18-Apr-07
The surprise milestone reached on 2 April, with what appears to be provisional agreement on the US Free Trade Agreement, could also benefit law firms operating in the UK, but the dust is still settling. As became clear last year, no progress was going to be made on opening up the Korean legal market until after KORUS FTA was concluded. But the draft proposals on the table in the form of the Legal Consultants Bill don't really represent much of an opening.
Reports of the contents of KORUS, however, indicate that US law firms might be able to bypass the restrictive bill. LegalWeek reported that the FTA envisages a five year transition period at the end of which US law firms ...