Dear member,

The second chance session on Digital Korea 2022 is to be held on Wednesday August 3 so if you missed the main session on July 21 please join us then.  Two pieces of good news since then.  The first is BOK’s advanced estimate of Q2 GDP which was surprisingly high at 2.9% YoY and 0.7% QonQ, putting Korea almost in a class of its own in a difficult 2022 when growth rates are almost universally being cut.   Exports in the first 20 days have also been strong.   The second is Samsung shipping 3nm chips finally, and ahead of TSMC.

It is two years since President Moon Jae-in announced the digital new deal.  The digital world has advanced globally outside of Korea, and inside.   Our KBF meeting on July 21 attempted to map out the digital landscape and indicate the changes in progress and the successes and failures.   We were assisted by a prerecorded interview with Eric Kim made the evening before as Eric was US bound at the time of our actual session.

Although the US talks about digital in the IPEF, some of the closest links are with Singapore that has provided a lot of the investment in digital services and in cloud and date warehouses. Korea signed a digital partnership agreement with Singapore at the end of 2021 and is negotiating others.  Collecting the data and the dissecting the different activities has been an enlightening experience  which I look forward to sharing with you.

We look at some of the Korean leaders of digital change; amongst them Kakao, Naver, Coupang, Hyundai Card, Daou Kiwoom and SK Telecom, and their hardware underwriters, Samsung and SK Hynix, and at where money is being made and lost in digitalization and digital services.  We will also see how the international players are doing; amongst them Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, IBM and SAP.

 Many multinationals are looking at their Korean subsidiary as a digital leader and experimentation platform in terms of marketing and delivery and we look at some of the opportunities offered.

Join us on August 3 online to discuss whether Korea deserves the position it is seeking as a key player in the digital space, or whether the human resource needs of the digital era  or other constraints are holding it back.  Our regular session will be held on August 18th when we look at the forecast for 2023 and 2024