“In the past, I only thought that Korea was behind Japan in terms of technology and capital. But now..

사진 확대 Choi Woo-gak, chairman of Daesung Hi-tech (center), is discussing technology with Reiziro Hasegawa (right), a Japanese precision processing engineer with more than 40 years of experience. Daesung Hi-tech
“In the past, I only thought that Korea was behind Japan in terms of technology and capital. But now is an era where we can only develop together by collaborating to fill each other’s shortcomings and push and pull each other.”

Daesung Hi-tech Chairman Choi Woo-gak summarized the past and present of industrial cooperation between Korea and Japan in this way, interviewing Maeil Economy with the company as a person based on cooperation between Korea and Japan over the past 30 years. The history of Korea-Japan industrial cooperation is intact in the growth process of Daesung Hi-tech, a small and medium-sized company that was established in 1995 and marks its 30th anniversary this year.

Daesung Hitech, which started as a precision parts business for industrial machinery, has targeted exports to the Japanese market from the beginning. The result was disastrous. It set a record of 50% defect rate in the volume of the first order received and delivered. Since then, Chairman Choi has focused on improving quality. Through Yamazaki Mazak in Japan, the world’s largest manufacturer of machine tools, it received technical guidance and actively recruited retired technicians to gain recognition in the local market.

Daesung Hi-tech acquired Nomura, an automatic shelf company in Switzerland, which was a client in 2014, and jumped to the top of the industry at once. Nomura, with a 75-year history, was one of the best in the field. It localized the highest-quality precision processing system through bold decisions such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A). At that time, Nomura reportedly had a family business succession issue. Japan, a super-aged society, has a more serious family business succession problem than Korea, and Daesung Hitech has taken a pioneering step in the recent rise of cooperation measures for Korean companies to acquire such Japanese companies.

Daesung Hi-tech has recently established Daesung Defense Industries, a local subsidiary in Europe, and is stepping up efforts to target the defense precision parts market. When asked if long-term cooperation with Japan was the basis for entering new businesses, Chairman Choi said, “Of course,” and stressed, “Japan’s many know-how, trust-based business promotion, and strict quality management became the basis for the company’s recognition in the global market.”

[Reporter Jeon Kyungwoon]