A scene from KT&G donating 400 million won for welfare of tobacco farmers at the KT&G Suanbo Training Center on May 23.

KT&G officials and staff are seen at a tobacco farm in Chungju, North Chungcheong Province, to help the farm. (Photos: KT&G)

KT&G has been showing that the company is the leader when it comes to mutual survival management by helping tobacco growers and their cooperative firms.
The tobacco and ginseng company gave 400 million won to the tobacco farms and their expenses to promote farmers’ welfare, which will be specifically used to pay for medical checkups for 1,000 tobacco farmers and scholarships for their children.
KT&G has been donating funds for those purposes since 2013, which came to 1.65 billion won so far, with some 4,600 farmers around the country benefitting.
In April, some 35 officers and staff of KT&G’s units, such as the Raw Materials Headquarters and the R&D headquarters, traveled to a tobacco farm in Miwon County, in Chungju, North Gyeongsang Province, and helped them harvest 2,000 kg of tobacco leaves and transplanted them in a farm as large as 7,933 square meters.
KT&G has been helping tobacco farms suffering from a workers shortage for the past 10 years by sending them workers, ranging from seedling plantations in the spring and harvesting tobacco leaves in the summer.
Those tobacco farms need many workers as most of the work has to be done by hand, especially gathering the grown tobacco leaves in July and August, which are the hottest months the summer. KT&G has been sending its people to help the tobacco farms during those critical two months, especially to help the tobacco leaves harvest.
KT&G’s global business strategy initially focused on strengthening the domestic manufacturing base as part of the restructuring of the company under privatization.
The company reduced the number of employees from 9,000 in 1996 to around 5,000 by 2000, and shut some of its most inefficient factories. KT&G became a joint stock company in 1997, spinning off the ginseng business as a wholly owned subsidiary, and went public on the Korean Stock Exchange in 1999. Up to 25% of the company was opened to foreign ownership.
An important part of this restructuring was expanded manufacturing capacity and distribution channels to increase exports. An unsuccessfully foray into the Japanese market in 1985 was terminated four years later when local consumers rejected the heavier taste of the Korean brands Pine Tree and Arirang. The company’s renewed efforts to export came in 1990 when rioting over cigarette shortages, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, led KT&G to sign a five million pack contract to fill the gap.
In 1992 KT&G opened an overseas liaison office in Hong Kong which was converted to a full sales subsidiary, Korea Tobacco & Ginseng Hong Kong Ltd., in 1994.