President Kim Young-hak of Korea Trade Insurance Corp.(Photo: KTIC)

“I will push for more support to help SMEs exports to double in the three years of my tenure at Korea Trade Insurance Corp. (KTIC),” said President Kim Young-hak recently.

During his first interview with local media since his inauguration as the CEO of KTIC in December last year, he said he will expand the financial support to SMEs so that they can increase exports, as it is a core objective of the Three-year Economic Development Plan to be pushed by the government under the Creative Economy drive.

The new CEO has a diverse background as a career bureaucrat. He was vice minister of the Ministry of Knowledge Economy with profound experiences in such areas as international trade, energy, and industrial development policies to name just a few. He was the president of the POSCO Management Institute before he came to KTIC.

He has many tough problems ahead as the international trade environment has worsened for Korean exports due mainly to the tapering of quantitative easing in the United States and the low value of the Japanese yen, among other reasons.

Kim said Korea has to get away from relying too heavily on large conglomerates to boost its annual international trade to $2 trillion, adding that he will try to redefine KTIC’s roles as the financial institution providing financial support to SMEs engaging in international trade.

KTIC introduced a trade insurance product that protects SMEs from losses when the foreign exchange ratio changes abruptly and it also plans to introduce export fund guarantees for up to 10 billion won to 214 selected SME exporters along with a 70-percent discount in insurance fees in order to expand support to SME exporters.

The Global Growth Ladder Program is provided for SMEs classified according to their potential and stage of growth, such as expert firms, export beginners, and global firms, so that they can get tailor-made financial support for exports.

KTIC also plans to give support to service firms, which can create many jobs, solving the problem that large conglomerates engaged in exports cannot always produce jobs, although they get so much benefit from favorable government policies.

“Now, we have to turn to exports of services to create jobs. KTIC will break the traditional mold that it has been giving its support to product export firms or manufacturers and provide its support to medical, tourism, and cultural industries to help them operate overseas in order to export their service products.

On the government moves to reform state-owned firms, he said it should include the reform of their organizational structures, along with cutting off loose management.

To really reform them, something should be done to correct the loose management-style or “do-nothing” management style, Kim said. He added that strict and diverse evaluation systems should be introduced, while at the same time they should reduce the head office in size and workload and delegate much of its work to regional offices or branches where much of the real work is done through direct meetings with customers in order to give more weight to jobsite management.