FTA with Peru good for Korean carmakers, resource developers(2)

The accord marks Korea’s second free trade agreement with a Latin American country, following the Korea-Chile pact, which took effect in April 2004.

Automobile, household appliance, and heavy machinery parts makers stand to benefit the most from the deal with Peru, experts and industry groups said.

The deal comes at a time when Korean carmakers’ presence in Peru is increasing, narrowing the gap with Japanese carmakers that have dominated the market for some time.

According to the Korea International Trade Association, Korean carmakers’ share of Peru’s imported car market for the first half of the year rose to 23.6 percent from the 7.4 percent recorded for 2004.

In contrast, Japanese carmakers’ market share fell from 64.3 percent to 46 percent over the same period. 

FTA with Peru good for Korean carmakers, resource developers

Carmakers, electronics firms stand to benefit most from deal

The free trade agreement between Korea and Peru is fueling hopes for expansion of Korean firms’ presence in the Latin American nation.

Concluding their more than one year of negotiations, the two countries agreed on Monday to eliminate all tariffs within 10 years after the deal takes effect.

“We share the understanding that the Korea-Peru FTA is mutually beneficial to both sides, and that this agreement is a comprehensive and high-quality FTA,” the trade ministers of Korea and Peru said in a joint statement.

The ministers also said that processes required for the implementation of the pact will be carried out promptly. The accord is expected to be signed in November after conducting legal reviews.

Bilateral trade volume came in at $1.56 billion in 2009 with Korean exports taking up $641 million.

LG Electronics to unveil smart TV in Germany

LG Electronics Inc. will this week unveil a smart TV at a global electronic goods fair in Germany, to join the television industry’s rush to introduce online applications to the living room.

The world’s second-largest TV maker said the new TV was its first Web-connected television, based on its own platform called NetCast. The smart TV will be showcased at the IFA trade show in Berlin, which is being held Sept. 3-8.

LG Electronics’ announcement comes as Japan’s Sony was also expected to reveal its new Google TV at the show.

Sony had said in May that it would join hands with Google and Intel to provide smart TVs built on Google’s open platform.

SK will recruit more to help job market

Conglomerate also seeks to extend help to smaller partner firms

SK Group, one of the country’s top corporations, will be recruiting more employees and trying to settle more accounts in cash to its partner firms as part of its latest plans for making a bigger contribution to community. 

SK on Thursday said it will be recruiting some 2,600 new workers this year, up 30 percent from the 2,000 it initially planned to select. 

The company has already recruited a total of 1,100 employees in the first half of this year, so it will be selecting an additional 1,500 in the latter half, company officials said.

Overall, the recruitment plans reflect a greater than 60 percent increase from the 1,600 that SK Group recruited last year. 

“We decided to recruit more people as a part of our strategy for going global, and also because we have been expanding our businesses at home as well,” one employee said. 

The plans for the increased recruitment also reflect the government’s latest calls for larger corporations to help create more jobs to overcome the lackluster job market conditions.

The overall jobless rate is not too high -- at around 3.5 percent, but youths aged between 15 and 29 continue to find it acutely difficult to find work.

The jobless rate for that age bracket reached over 8 percent in the past year. 

The move from SK comes as more corporations face a bigger responsibility to contribute to social and economic well-being. Citing the government support lent to the firms amid the previous year’s economic troubles, President Lee Myung-bak has been fervently urging the corporate sector to deliver on its promise to create 400,000 new jobs this year. 

Chey Tae-won, the chairman of SK Group, recently is said to have told his CEOs that bigger companies have an obligation to help smaller businesses and the middle or lower-class to learn how to “catch the fish on their own,” so that they cancontinue to be competitive. 

To help create more jobs for the less advantaged, SK also said it would seek to make 10,000 new social jobs by 2012, up from the current 6,000. SK will seek to establish a total of 28 social enterprises over the next two years to add 3,600 more jobs in order to achieve its 10,000 target.

Samsung Electronics sees product crisis despite surging sales

About an hour south of Seoul, bulldozers are demolishing the last vacant factories at Samsung Electronics Co.’s Suwon campus, erasing signs that Korea’s most valuable public company once made its headquarters in a smoke-fuming industrial complex. 

In their place are ice cream and pizza parlors, research labs and open space that’s been groomed as parks. Engineers in T-shirts play basketball on this sunny June morning before heading to their choice of nine cafeterias for a free lunch featuring Korean, Indian and Western dishes prepared to please employees from 50 countries. 

Women, who until recently were forced to wear conservative business suits and were absent from top jobs, stroll through gardens in slacks and formerly banned open-toed shoes, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its October issue. 

Data confirms dearth of young South Koreans

Younger South Koreans aged between nine and 24 years of age account for just one out of every five people as society ages at a rapid pace, government datashowed on Friday.

The figure was a sharp drop from the so-called “Baby Boom” era in the 1960s-70s when one out of every three South Koreans was that age, according to Statistics Korea.

Of the entire population — the national population is currently tallied at just less than 50 million — only around 10 million, or 21 percent, were aged between nine and 24 years of age this year.

The figures suggest that the proportion of teenagers and other younger people will shrink to less than 20 percent of the population by 2015. 

By 2025, the figure may drop to around 15 percent. 

The government-run Statistics Korea releases studies on the future trend of national demographics based on a population census it conducts every five years.

“The low birthrate is believed to be the number one cause of the decline in the number of youths,” said Hong Kyung-hee of Statistics Korea.

An increasing number of people here are opting to have smaller families, bringing the nation’s birthrate down to 1.15 per woman last year.

Busan-Jinhae receives best FEZ rating

The Busan-Jinhae Free Economic Zone has received the best overall rating among three free economic zones in a recent government assessment thanks to its effective links of port infrastructure with manufacturing and logistics industries.

The Free Economic Zone Committee, under the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, last month unveiled the results of its evaluation of three FEZs designated in 2003 -- Busan-Jinhae, Gwangyang and Incheon.

The three other FEZs designated in 2008 -- Yellow Sea, Daegu-North Gyeongsang and Saemangum-Gunsan -- will be assessed later. 

Busan-Jinhae received grade B with 73.3 points out of 100 while Gwangyang and Incheon earned C’s with 69.1 and 64.9. 

U.S. nuclear envoy to visit this week

A senior U.S. nuclear official will visit South Korea this week to discuss resumption of the multilateral forum aimed at ending North Korea‘s nuclear programs, officials here said.

Sung Kim, Washington’s special envoy to the six-party talks, will visit Seoul on a three-day visit from Wednesday to attend a security forum hosted by the Unification Ministry. Officials at Seoul‘s Foreign Ministry said Kim will also meet his counterparts here for discussions on the six-party talks and recent U.S. sanctions on Pyongyang.

The six-party talks, which opened in 2003, involve the two Koreas, the U.S., Russia, Japan and host China. The discussions have been on hold since December 2008 on a North Korean boycott.

The North’s torpedoing of the South Korean warship Cheonan in March also dampened the mood for resuming the talks.

Kim‘s trip comes amid a flurry of diplomatic activities by dialogue partners to push for the restart of the nuclear talks. Wi Sung-lac, South Korea’s top nuclear representative, was in Washington over the weekend, meeting his U.S. counterparts. Wu Dawei, the chief Chinese nuclear envoy, recently visited Pyongyang, Seoul, Tokyo and then Washington.

“Kim will sit down with our officials to review what was discussed between the U.S. and China and then review bilateral issues between the U.S. and South Korea,” a Foreign Ministry official here said. “He will also exchange opinions with us on the recent U.S. sanctions on North Korea.”

Regional powers remain divided over the next course of action for the stalled nuclear talks. South Korea maintains North Korea must first apologize for sinking the Cheonan and take concrete steps toward denuclearization. 

Wi told reporters in Washington on Saturday that he believed it was “premature” to resume the six-party talks at this juncture.

“I am not saying we are not going to participate in the six-party talks, but I am saying it‘s premature to go to the six-party talks at this point,” he said after meeting with Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and other U.S. officials to discuss the reopening of the negotiations stalled over U.N. sanctions for the North’s missile and nuclear tests. “We need to work for the environment for the six-party talks.”

Wi’s remarks are in line with State Department spokesman Philip Crowley, who on Wednesday dismissed Wu Dawei‘s proposal for another bilateral contact between the U.S. and North Korea.

Rooney's sex scandal rocks Britain

Jennifer Thompson, 21, who charges £1,200 a night, claims she slept with 24-year-old Rooney, seven times in four months, British media reported.

Thompson, who calls herself Juicy Jeni on her Facebook site, says she and Rooney had sex in one of Manchester’s most exclusive hotels, and visited nightclubs and casinos together, Daily Mail reported.

Gender sensitivity takes education, practice

You are told you look “sexy” at a job interview. Someone at your work place leaves porn on his computer. Your superior says your skirt is too short. At a social drinking event, someone makes a sexual joke and everyone laughs but you.

Have you just been sexually harassed?

Yes, you have, if you felt humiliation, cruelty or indignity, regardless of the initial intention of the offender. 

But in reality, it’s all in limbo. Whether you feel victimized or not, the person in authority can use their position to help them get away with it, especially in a work place where power hierarchy is clearly visible. They might say: calling you sexy is simply a compliment; having porn on their computer is not your business but theirs. They comment on the way you dress because they care. The sexual jokes weren’t directed towards you.

To fight back, you need to be sensitive. Gender-sensitive, to be more precise.



Training



On a Monday afternoon at the Korean Institute for Gender Equality Promotion and Education in Seoul, about 30 people gathered in a classroom to learn how to be “gender-sensitive” and how to define sexual harassment. Most of them were officials from corporations and educational institutions -- the law requires at least one person from every sector of private and public organizations’ office to take gender sensitivity training session at the institute -- assigned to take the class to become counselors at their work. Together, they performed a case study. Is being called sexy being harassed? Men and women are both confused. 

Diplomats’ kids at ministry under scrutiny

The government is poring over the files of diplomats’ children who work at the Foreign Ministry after Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan offered to resign Saturday amid controversy over his daughter’s employment. 

President Lee Myung-bak said he would accept Yu’s resignation, which came a week after three of his eight new Cabinet picks stepped down after humiliating confirmation hearings.