The Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK) has been sparing no efforts to boost its overseas operations, along with its main role of helping SMEs continue to grow by extending financial support. It’s all part of a broader plan by the government to make SMEs a big part of the national economy.
IBK opened its first branch in Manila, the Philippines, last December. The country was deemed to have great economic potential, along with Vietnam, Indonesia and India. Around 1,500 Korean firms are operating there and over 100,000 Korean residents live and work in the S.E. Asian country.
IBK also has been busy at work in China, opening a branch in Tianjin last July, to strengthen its banking network in the neighboring country. The city is an industrial hub in China with many local companies operating plants there and many Korean firms also operating in the city.
IBK has a total of 16 branches and banking outlets in China in such large cities as Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao and Suchow, among others.
The bank also has a number of branches in India with its branch in New Delhi opening in April, last year. The bank has a rep office in Jakarta, Indonesia. Some 1,255 Korean firms doing business there to take advantage of its great economic potential, therefore it is as important as Vietnam and China to Korean firms operating overseas.
IBK has a banking network in Cambodia, too, to cater to the Korean textile firms operating in the country. The bank opened its office in Phnom Pen in January last year, which was followed by an office in Myanmar and two branches in Vietnam under the bank’s strategy to not miss the opportunities in the CLMV, namely Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.
IBK plans to continue to expand its global banking network to places outside Asia, including the Middle East, Western and Eastern Europe, North America and South and Central America. The bank now has 27 banking outlets in 11 foreign countries.
For those countries, IBK has no immediate plans to open its outlets. It already signed cooperative agreements with major banks in those countries to provide indirect financial support to the Korean firms operating there. The bank signed cooperative tie-ups with 14 banks in 14 countries that don’t have IBK outlets, including Australia, Germany, Russia, Turkey and the UAE, among others.
President Kwon Seon-joo said IBK will boost the share of overseas operation in its total earnings to around 20 percent, which would make IBK a leading expert bank on SME financing in Asia very soon.
“IBK has strategically capitalized on its profound knowledge and experience as Korea’s leading SME lender in pursuing global markets. Going forward, we will continuously develop new products, enhance the quality of our services, and expand our client base from one that is currently Korean-oriented to one which also deals with local companies in overseas markets,” IBK said. “Ultimately, we aim to become a global local bank in the truest sense.”
It took IBK 44 years since its establishment on Aug. 1, 1961 to see the number of its corporate clients surpass the 500,000 threshold. By 2005, that number had reached 506,000. It then took only eight years to double again, crossing the historic 1 million mark on Dec. 19, 2013. In less than a year, our consistent efforts toward core competency- building and platform-building added 100,000 new corporate clients, bringing the new total to 1.1 million as of Dec. 15, 2014. Moving forward, IBK aims to further solidify its predominance in the corporate banking business by aggressively expanding its corporate client base to fuel our new growth engines.
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