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A lot of short term minded people are shaking in their boots recently due to currency shocks and the Korean stock indexes dropping almost as fast as the Nikkei dropped & rose in the past few days. However, this little story may show why it’s hard to doubt the Koreans in business:
“…there was no shipbuilding industry in South Korea until the 1960s. When the country’s dictator, Park Chung-hee, summoned Chong [Hyundai’s founder] and told him to produce oil tankers, for which there was a sudden demand, Chong went straight to Greece and scooped up two contracts to build 260,000-tonne tankers, promising his customers delivery within two years, sooner than anyone else. He had neglected to mention that at that moment he lacked even a shipyard. He then waved the order in front of Barclays Bank, which lent him enough money to build a modern yard. No one in South Korea knew how to do that, so Chong dispatched 60 engineers to Scotland to learn. The ships were delivered before the deadline. This famous story, concedes Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago in a refreshingly revisionist modern history, “Korea’s Place in the Sun”, may be apocryphal in its details, yet it has a strong whiff of truth about it.” Continue reading