"Moving the Capital" to China
The sixth floor of Beijing Yansha Guangming Hotel is the headquarters of Hanzhong Real Estate Co., Ltd. On the wall of general manager Liang Zaiwan's office, he ordered a copper map of China with red stars. These red stars reveal the ambition of Korean Liang: Before 2003, 400 real estate consulting service chain stores will be established in major cities in China.
Since 1980 established a real estate consulting and development company in Seoul, Liang has been in this industry for more than 20 years. However, when Liang started to focus on China in 1997, his consulting business, which had long been a minor celebrity in Seoul, almost stopped. "I want to develop South Korea and China at the same time, but time and other conditions don't allow it. Therefore, when faced with the choice of South Korea or China, I decisively chose China and stopped the Korean business. "
At present, 46-year-old Liang has invested 50 million yuan in China, and plans to increase the investment to 500 million yuan by the middle of this year.
Small and medium-sized enterprises are not the only Korean-funded enterprises that want to move their base camp to China.
The third-generation head of LG Group, a Korean family holding company, plans to move its headquarters to Beijing around 1995, and plans to increase its investment in China to110 billion USD by 2005. In March this year, the LG Building, located near Jianguomen in Beijing and next to Guomao Building, will break ground.
According to LG insiders, this luxury building with an investment of 300 million US dollars will be built into the shape of the twin towers similar to the LG building in South Korea. "It's just more advanced and modern than the Korean headquarters. It has a height of 35 stories, which is higher than Guo Mao and luxurious. "
"The relocation of LG's headquarters to China means that all business work involving the China market and the Asian market will be handled at its headquarters in China. In the future, more than half of LG's bosses may be in China, and all senior operators will attend the meeting at the Beijing headquarters. " The LG person who asked not to be named said.
The reason why LG "moved the capital" is simple: the Korean market is saturated, and the development of LG in Europe and America is not satisfactory, but its achievements and development prospects in China market are impressive-almost all the more than 30 factories invested and built in China are profitable. In addition, China has a huge market potential, and its labor and resource costs are lower than those of South Korea. Zheng Zhongji, vice president of Samsung's China headquarters, said: "We should consider where to invest, where to develop and where to be more competitive." . "Under the same competitive advantage, (Korean companies) may be closer to China."
Although Samsung has not gone as far as LG, the China market has always been at the forefront of Samsung's market strategic map. 1999 As a step of internal reform, Samsung cancelled three of the original five regional headquarters in the world, namely, Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States, and retained the headquarters in China and Japan.
"People sent by the company to the Japanese headquarters generally have no special requirements, but those sent to the China headquarters must be the top of the Korean headquarters." Zheng Zhongji said. At present, the general representative of China District is "China Connect" who has worked in China for 10 years and former vice president of Samsung products. His predecessor was Li Bikun, the second-in-command and third-in-command of Samsung headquarters.
If you can enter China, you can enter China.
Observers believe that with the success of 200 1 China's WTO entry and Olympic bid, the Korean business community has experienced another "China fever" after the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea in 1992. Many large Korean enterprise groups, such as Samsung, LG, SK, Posco, Hyosung Group and Han Song Group, put their investment in China in a prominent position when they expressed their investment plans after 2002.
According to the director of Jinchang Town of Korea Chamber of Commerce, there are about five or six thousand Korean-funded enterprises investing in China. "Shandong Province has the largest population, about 2,000 people, of which Qingdao alone has more than 1 1,000 people." The investment scale is also different. "Big enterprise groups like Samsung and LG have invested billions, and many small ones have opened small restaurants for tens of thousands of dollars." Jin said.
Jiang Rongtie, who once set up a company to provide consulting, market research and agency business registration services for Korean-funded enterprises investing in China, said: "Other foreign capital has developed in some industries, while Korean-funded enterprises in China, large and small, have penetrated almost every industry in China."
In fact, it is not a recent phenomenon for Korean capital to seek opportunities in China. As early as 1997, Wang Zhile, an expert on transnational corporations who published the book "Korean Enterprises Investing in China", said in an interview with this reporter that the greatest influence of Korean capital in China should be between 1992 and 1997. He said, with the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and China on August 29th, 1992, the investment of Korean-funded enterprises in China has made rapid progress, just like the stock market blowout. At that time, Qingdao alone claimed to have more than 5,000 Korean companies. In just four or five years, South Korea suddenly became the fifth largest source of investment in China from almost zero.
However, with the advent of the Asian financial crisis, many Korean-funded enterprises investing in China have been hit hard. "During the financial crisis, the lights of many office buildings in Qingdao were black at night." The Qingdao Municipal Government once estimated that between 65438-0997 and 65438-0998, about half of the local Korean-funded enterprises stopped production or withdrew their capital due to the financial crisis.
At present, the background of the second Korean-funded China craze (if there were no financial crisis, the investment craze of Korean-funded enterprises would probably last until now) is that, as Liang Zaiwan, general manager of Hanzhong Real Estate Co., Ltd. said, the China market is not "another market" outside Korea, but a natural "extension" of many Korean enterprises to the Korean domestic market. Especially after the Asian financial crisis, South Korea's local economic development has reached saturation, and the cost of human resources has reached a very high level, while neighboring China is in a period of rapid economic development, and the market still has great potential. For Korean enterprises, including many small and medium-sized enterprises, China naturally becomes their new development space.
However, it is undeniable that the geographical and cultural proximity between China and South Korea has also played a role in fueling the situation. The heads of Korean-funded enterprises interviewed by our reporter emphasized this closeness. Korean culture and education attaches importance to Confucius and Mencius culture, which makes many Koreans in China feel no sense of foreign land, which is almost exclusively enjoyed by all foreign businessmen in China.
Zheng Zhongji, vice president of Samsung Group's China headquarters, has never been to China since he was sent to China by the headquarters in 2000. He always thinks, "How is it exactly the same as South Korea? It seems that many things here are known before and are very familiar. " In the seven years before he was in Germany, "there was always a sense of strangeness, and I always felt unsafe."