Drive World Cup Korea to Buy Korea

Korean major businesses will launch corporate promotion strategies from the second half of this year by applying the national image improved with World Cup.

According to an industrial source, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Hyundai Motors, Kia Motors, etc have plans overseas IR road-show and the CEOs will participate in the road-show with the results of the first half of this year. The businesses expect to maximize their corporate image partly because of the improvement of national image with World Cup , and partly because of historical business performance in the first half of this year.

In case of Samsung Electronic, after reporting the business performance of the second quarters and the first half of this year at 19th of July, CEOs such as Yun Jong Young - Vice Chairman, Hwang Chang Kyu – Managing Director of Memory Business, etc will visit for a week New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore etc for IR road-show. During the IR road-show, Samsung Electronics will promote the strengths of the third generation technologies; digital television, 12 inch wafer of semiconductor, digital motion image cellular phone, etc.

LG evaluates that the overseas IR read-show in the first half of this year has had good results. So it will focus on LG image of high quality in the second half of this year.

LG Electronics will have IR road-shows in US, Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc in the middle of July and October. LG Chemicals will have road shows in Boston, Chicago, New York San Francisco, etc of US, London of UK, Frankfurt of Germany, Milan of Italy, etc in September and October.

Hyundai Motors, one of official sponsors of Korea-Japan World Cup, had good results by inviting major foreign investors for the viewing of World Cup games, IR and industrial execution. The company will launch active IR road-show in foreign countries as historical business performance of the first half of this year is reported. As the Korea image improves, Hyundai Motors will reinforce marketing activities for Europe that is the hometown of soccer.

In July, Kia Motors will invite 246 media reporters of 19 European countries to Sicily for ‘Motor Show of New Model Sorento’ and will launch IR road-show in Europe and Asia in the second half of this year.

Kwang-Hyun Kim kkh@donga.com