Kim And His Universe

While you want to believe the first part of the now legendary extract from Daewoo founders biographical work, Every street is paved with Gold, the latter is beyond most. If he could double the turnover of the group in just two years, well, he very well knows how to use what he makes.

There is an easy way to find out whether he is an expert in making money. Drive an all new Nubira or for that matter a smaller Lanos or a bigger Leganza! If you are still not impressed as to whether a Daewoo can be as good as any other European or American equivalent let alone equal a Japanese concern, then you ought to visit the Okpo Shipyard.

 

It handles 136 ships a year building most of them and repairing the rest. Or gaze at the 900 tonne crane through which they have built their way into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Now, lets see how and why Kim Woo-choong made a lot of money. He redefined the term education and spelt it as absorption. General Motors, Suzuki, Caterpillar, all learnt doing business with him the hard way. Assembling cars and earth moving equipment and exporting them was fine for a while, but when a belligerent GM said no to complete technology transfer, Daewoo showed them how to make clones of GM products, which looked and performed better. None of the above mentioned companies have any significant role in South Korea today.

And such severance of relationships never meant that they did not keep their link. The Daewoo auto components firm churns out completely assembled auto parts for GM today. Those red-heads powering Chevrolet Corvettes with Made in the USA stickers will never know that the AC compressor under the hood was made in Taegu, South Korea.

In short, Kim, like all the great Detroit heroes, knew that money from the internal combustion engine came from all those spare parts that made it work.

Yes, he once worked for one Col Muammar el-Qaddafi. But you will excuse him, for around the same time he endowed $30 million for the Daewoo foundation for use in the cultivation and advancement of basic sciences.

Yes, chairman Kim is more of a leader than an owner. And Daewoo (which translates to Great Universe) is a chaebol with a difference. And though his literary work was aimed at reminding a young generation of Koreans as to what the last generation went through, it can easily give more than a lesson to the Indian entrepreneurs.

Those entrepreneurs adopted technology way back in the sixties but never found any reason to adapt them, let alone invest a part in research and development. We had the state-of-the-art technology of the sixties in the form of Vespa, Morris Oxford (Ambassador) and Fiat 1100. And like Kim, we threw out those who came with the technology too. But the mere fact that we are still building the same models and will continue to build them well into the next century, explains the difference. But it is never too late. Maybe we should adopt Kims ways.