The nation observed the 52th Trade Day in a ceremony held at Coex in southern Seoul on Dec. 7 with some 680 people winning medals and citations for contributions to the growth of the export industries in Korea. Five people won gold medals, led by Chairman Suh Kyung-bae of AmorePacific Co.
President Park Geun-hye, in her congratulatory address, said Korea has now become an important international trading country, exporting high-tech goods like premium-class communication equipment, home appliances and autos, although its export products included minerals, animal furs and sericultural products only half century ago.
“Many in the world called Korea’s growth nothing short of a miracle. But of late, our international trade value is likely to fall short of $1 trillion for the first time in four years this year due to a number of reasons, including a sharp fall in the price of oil,” said Park. “But by volume, our international trade expanded year-on-year to put Korea a step up in the ranks of the global trading country list to rank the 6th and 3rd on the list of export countries that were able to expand their exports this year in the world with Korea’s product market shares in such key world market countries as the U.S. and China expanding.”
Support has been provided by large business firms to the 17 Creative Economy Reform Centers around the country and helped by the moves to turn domestic SMEs around to become export firms, the exports of SMEs expanded so far this year to 35.7 percent from 33.8 percent last year.
“All these achievements have been the product of the hard work by all of you, the people, who worked in the international trading areas,” Park added.
However, everything will not be easy for the export sector in the days ahead. International trade conditions are tightening, led by the revaluation of the currencies of our trading competitor countries.
But not everything is dark in the way of expanding exports, as the FTAs signed with China, New Zealand and Vietnam will be in force before the year is out, giving our corporations access to three-quarters of the world’s GDP.
The chief executive said she would like to point out a number of ways to continue to expand our exports, the first being to diversify export products further and expand the number of countries that import Korea’s products.
“We ought to take advantage of our diplomatic efforts to explore new foreign countries to target the exports of our products, namely, the Middle East, Central and South America, Central Europe,” she said. “The government will extend its support to the exporters in such areas as trade finance, and marketing by dispatching trade missions to those regions. The government will also try to sign FTAs with Mexico and Israel, at the same time such mega international trade ties like TPP and RCEP.”
The installation of solar energy panels and ESS at a fruit processing plant in Amazon River in Brazil under the Global Climate Fund (GCF) financing, which we proposed would be a successful sample for Korean firms advancement to overseas market in the future.
“Secondly, our SMEs should grow further take over an important part of our exports by strengthening their export capacities by themselves and the government will spare no effort to back them up.”
President Park continued: “Lastly, we should boost the competitive strength of our traditional major powerhouse export industries with a huge and daring preemptive investments in such areas as integration of manufacturing and IT to generate new added-value. A pharmaceutical company recently sold its technologies to a foreign pharmaceutical company at the price 10 times over its annual sales. It has taken the company 15 years of arduous R&D effort to develop those new technologies. The miraculous achievement should a shining example for what R&D activities can do for a company to the entire business community,” the president concluded.
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