The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) announced comprehensive steps to reinvent industrial complexes as core centers to jumpstart the national economy at an economic ministers’ meeting on pending state affairs on Nov. 3.
Industrial complexes have spearheaded industrialization and the growth of the Korean economy in the past 60 years. As of the end of 2021, 1,257 industrial complexes across the nation accommodate about 110,000 tenant companies, employing a combined 2.27 million people.
They account for 63 percent of the nation’s manufacturing production, or 1,104 trillion won (66 percent) of exports, or $402.4 billion.
But of late, industrial complexes have seen production and employment decline due to aging of industrial facilities, infrastructure and manpower.
Accordingly, related ministries, including MOTIE and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT). Worked out comprehensive steps to create conditions in which industrial complexes can be reshaped into a new industrial space full of innovation and dynamics based on the private sector’s autonomy and creativity.
The comprehensive steps consist of 83 policy tasks in five areas - digitalization of industrial complexes, making them low-carbon, improving work and settlement conditions, ramping up safety and regulatory reform of sites.
First, industrial complexes will pursue innovation in a format in which the private sector plays a leading role, supported by the government.
Each industrial complex has different business classification and different sizes of companies. The conventional, unified, fiscally financed policies cannot reform industrial complexes.
Accordingly, industrial complexes will be reviewed from scratch so that the private sector can spearhead efforts to improve their infrastructure.
They will directly or indirectly utilize the private sector’s capital to improve industrial complex facilities and industrial complex sites will be used in a more efficient fashion.
The government will not spare fiscal input and support at areas in which the government’s roles are essential.
Since making industrial complexes, ramping up safety and climate change responses cannot be addressed only with the private sector’s voluntary efforts, so the private sector will lead projects, which will be supported by the government.
Secondly, industrial complexes will undergo changes by working out overall innovation strategies to enhance industrial complexes’ competitiveness, raise the quality of life and secure safety, a one-step level-up from the conventional partial and individual industry complex policies.
Lastly, policies tailored based on demand through thorough analyses will be implemented.
Low-carbon industry complex policies will be prepared through analyses by specialized institutions while the “greater industrial complex diagnosis program” is to be implemented with support tailored based on analysis of tenant companies’ digital and energy consumption levels.
As for core policy tasks, digitalization of industrial complexes will start with raising tenant companies’ awareness toward digitalization.
The greater industrial complex diagnosis program, designed to diagnose the preparatory work of digitalizing tenant companies of industrial complexes, will be implemented to exactly assess and evaluate each company’s digitalization situation to provide support for digital transformation, corresponding to their levels.
In particular, all data sets secured during the diagnosis process will be divulged with companies’ consent, so companies which fail to be diagnosed, will be put to self-diagnose process to spread the effect of the project and improve fiscal transparency.
MOTIE Vice Minister Jang Young-jin said, “The industrial complex steps are growth strategies for the whole of our manufacturing sector, and creating conditions in which industrial complexes and tenant companies can undergo changes on their own to max out their intrinsic integration effects, the strong points of industrial complexes, is a core of industrial complex policies.”
KICOX Strikes MOU with Daegu on Shared Housing for Regional Youth
Korea Industrial Complex Corp. (KICOX) struck an MOU with Daegu City on the provision of the former’s shared housing units for regional youth, KICOX said on Nov. 3. KICOX signed an MOU on the operation of 30 shared officetel units for regional youth in Daegu.
KICOX became the first corporation among public entities relocated to Daegu’s innovation new city to provide shared housing units for regional youth for the purpose of regional shared growth and development.
