TECHNOLOGY : Success Breeds High-Tech Skinflints, S. Koreans Say
Soh Jin Wha, head of South Korea’s largest private research center, gets guided tours of most of the important projects when he visits U.S. consumer electronics labs.
In Japan, he barely gets in the door.
“Most of the Japanese labs don’t let me in--they just lead me to an office and that’s it,” he said. “Japan got most of its technology from America--often for free or at a nominal price. So why are they so stingy?”
Industry and government officials in South Korea complain that foreigners, especially the Japanese, are becoming technology tightwads for fear of fierce Korean competition.
For Soh, who left a job at a Rhode Island university in 1987 to lead 2,300 researchers at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in Seoul, gaining access to foreign technology is vital.
Samsung, South Korea’s leading electronics firm, and other South Korean firms in industries as diverse as autos, steel and textiles, became export giants in the 1980s by wedding a diligent, low-cost labor force with technology bought or, some say, stolen from abroad.
A scarcity of new technology since then has meant a slowdown in product development that has hurt South Korea’s ability to compete in the high-tech marketplace in the past two years.
Rising wages, a higher won, South Korea’s currency, and increased protectionism overseas have also undermined many of the nation’s strategic advantages.
A major goal during South Korean President Roh Tae Woo’s visit to Tokyo in May was to uncork Japanese technology. But Seoul knows it must rely ultimately on itself.
Japan now sees South Korea as an economic rival and has become increasingly wary of selling technology that may sharpen South Korea’s competitive edge.
“There is no choice but to develop our own technology,” said a director of a leading government-affiliated think tank.
Although far behind Japan in the race for new technology, South Korea is no slouch. It ranked 13th in the world last year in total research and development efforts, with 58,000 researchers and $3.5 billion of investment.
But the nation’s economy is too small to compete across the board, and instead it is concentrating on information technology, including micro-electronics, computer software and optics.
South Korea has ambitious plans to increase its researchers by nearly threefold and its research spending by more than five times, to $18 billion, by the year 2000.
It is not clear where the money will come from. Also, to take the global lead in even one narrow technology is expected to take at least 10 years, Soh said.
“In the meantime, we need help from overseas, especially Japan and the United States,” he added.
Japan provides about half of all the technology licensed to South Korea, and the United States about one quarter, according to South Korea’s Ministry of Science & Technology.
Most of the licenses provided by Japan are not in leading-edge technologies. Japan fears cut-throat Korean competitors will combine high technology with lower manufacturing costs to undercut Japanese firms.
Korean government and industry officials say the Japanese are so far ahead that their fears are unjustified. Instead, they believe that Japan is trying to use its technology to wipe out its Asian competitors.
“Japan uses technology as a commercial weapon,” said Choi Jong-Duk, general manager of strategic planning for Samsung Electronics.
Japanese firms sometimes refuse to sell key parts or to license technologies. If they do, it is only to extract huge fees or to play domestic firms off each other, he said.
