LS Group Chairman Koo Ja-yeol.

While delivering his new year’s message on Jan. 2, LS Group Chairman Koo Ja-yeol stressed optimizing his group’s business portfolios to secure infrastructure for sustainable growth.  Koo’s focus is designed to reconfigure his group’s duplicated businesses in a rational fashion and shore up cash creation capabilities through substantial management to secure sustainable growth. 

Koo specified his group’s management tenets — optimizing business portfolios, innovating organizational capability and settling down a corporate culture that suits the demands of the times. “We have to take a look at business portfolios in a futuristic perspective and a precise manner to overcome stagnation and ensure a sustainable growth as shown as a few major companies’ M&As and change into a structure of leading markets,” he said. 

LS will have to restructure subsidiaries, including marginalized businesses, stagnant businesses and overseas incorporated companies and eliminate duplicate businesses and non-essential businesses, Chairman Koo said.

Chairman Koo takes stock of the group’s R&D strategies and direction when he presides over a CTO meeting and technology consultation every three months. In this regard, the group continues to pour between 800 billion won and 900 billion won in the core equipment and R&D areas every year. 

The LS T-Fair is LS Group’s representative R&D reporting exhibition. The group sponsors the annual fair. It marked the 10th anniversary since 2its founding in 2004, with the goal of strengthening its technological competitiveness and spreading an R&D environment. 

Each subsidiary of the group is stepping on the gas to yield tangible results in new growth engine businesses, converging energy efficiency into the existing mainstay business sectors. Large-scale investments are being made to localize technologies of such new businesses as underground cables, smart grids, ultra voltage DC transmissions and automotive parts, as well as exploring overseas markets. 

LS Cable & System set up a plant specializing in the production of underground cables at a cost of 180 billion won in 2009. The global demand of underground cables, which has emerges as an essential technology for such alternative energy sources as wind power complexes and power transmission among states, has been on the rise of late. The company was awarded a $435 million underground cable contract by Qatar’s state-run petroleum company in 2009, which stands as a record for the Korean cable industry when it comes to overseas winning projects. 

LS Cable & System has been chosen as the preferred bidder to transfer technologies and supply products to KAPES, a joint venture established by Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) and Alstom of France. 

LS-Nikko Copper, the No.1 Company in the nonferrous metal industry, set up a joint venture firm with Codelco in Chile, and preparations for breaking ground on a plant are under way. 

LS-Mtron has developed tractors outfitted with environmentally-friendly engines surpassing European and U.S. environmental regulations, and made inroads into advanced agricultural instrument markets and emerging markets, including those in South America and Central Asia. 

E1, leading Korea into the era of eco-friendly energy by implementing the nation’s first liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) import business, is accelerating its efforts to explore foreign markets. The company has established a branch office in the United States to import shale gas as part of its efforts to diversify import countries.