Gwangju City has been actively pushing ahead with building an "affluent economic community" through six strategies, a top official of the metropolitan city said.
In an interview with Korea IT Times, Kang Woon-tae, mayor of Gwangju Metropolitan City, said, "Our vision is to create a happy creation city. To realize this goal, we will construct an autonomous community through participation and communication."
The mayor said, "First of all, we aim to create 100,000 new jobs. In the private sector, we will offer 30,000 new jobs. Along with this, we will build a job creation system, which will provide youths, females and old people with jobs."
Secondly, the city plans to exert its best efforts to build a region favorable for business activity. "Related to this, the city will establish a task force supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in which heads of relevant institutions participate, actively foster promising SMEs, and reform industrial structure," he said.
Thirdly, he said, the city will foster the five main industries in earnest, which are automobiles, home appliances, photonics, green energy and culture industries. In addition, the city plans to nurture such future value industries as precision molds, battery and health care.
"For development of the automobile industry, we will bring up the parts industry for clean diesel cars. The city will rear such future-oriented home appliance industries as intelligent home appliance, robot and life care. At the same time, we will develop the present photonics industry into next-generation lighting industry such as convergence, LED, OLED and laser," said Kang.
"In particular, Gwangju City will actively foster green energy industry by placing its focus on hydrogen and solar batteries. As a future-growth industry, we will rear precision molding industry and knowledge-based service industry,' said the mayor.
Noting that the city will develop the Gwangju research and development special zone into an internationally opened research industrial estate, he said, "We will build an LED-specialized estate in the special zone and foster core technology manpower."
To energize the traditional market and support small business owners, Kang said, the city will enact regulations to rationally regulate super super markets (SSM), strengthen the win-win cooperation between large and smaller retailers, and support traditional markets.
"Finally, we will establish a 10-year program to develop the existing agriculture in suburbs of the city into environment-friendly and bio agriculture. In line with this, we will create tourism-type scenic agriculture district where farmers can produce organic vegetables. By linking with the LED photonics industry, we will also foster agricultural facilities," he said.
5 Regional representative industries
Following photonics, home appliance and automobile industries, Gwangju City plans to add green energy and cultural industries to the list of the city's five main industries, which will be fostered as regional representative industries, Kang said.
Commenting that the city has been actively fostering the photonics industry since the 2000s, he said, "Despite such short development period of 10 years, Gwangju has emerged as one of the world's top five photonics advanced cities. It reflects our valuable efforts to tide over such difficulties as insufficient information, capital and technology in the unfamiliar sector."
In the city's photonics industry, for instance, total sales soared from 110 billion won in 1999 to 1.6 trillion won in 2009 and the number of related companies rose from 47 to 346 during the corresponding period.
Meanwhile, the number of employees in the photonics industry surged from 1,900 in 1999 to 6,870 in 2009, and the number of companies with sales of over 10 billion won reached 20 in 2009.
"Noteworthy was the World Photonics EXPO 2010 held in April and May in Gwangju that succeeded in heralding the Gwangju-based photonics companies' excellent technologies and products to overseas buyers and global companies," said the mayor.
About 20 percent of Korean photonics companies operate their factories in Gwangju at present and regional universities opened photonics-related curriculum to produce excellent manpower in the sector.
"We are now engaging in programs for active exchanges of information and manpower in the photonics industry with such advanced countries as Japan and the U.S. Along with this, we built a system for Korea-Russia LED exchange cooperation on Oct. 7 and participated in the Malaysia's LED project on Oct. 9," he explained.
"Particularly, we are finalizing the 'photonics 2020' project to jack up the level of Gwangju's photonics industry to ranks of the world's top three by 2015. Related to this, we are creating the Mecca of next-generation photonics production and the hub city of LED global production here, while building a foundation for photonics convergence industry," he said.
Construction of global-level home appliance industrial city
Gwangju City selected the home appliance industry as one of the city's strategic industries and has made a goal of becoming a powerhouse industry by 2020. In line with this commitment, the city is pushing for construction of infrastructure for a premium-class digital living home appliance and parts industry, and for a localized corporate supporting service.
"Thanks to such efforts, about 600 home appliance-related companies are operating in the city, accounting for 17.5 percent of the domestic output in the home appliance sector. We plan to actively foster digital information home appliance industry, which grafts living home appliance industry onto electronics parts industry," said Kang.
"Moreover, we will make a strong push for development of future-oriented new industries through development of U-life care products that organically combines medical service and IT industry, activation of home appliance robot industry, and localization & standardization of parts. By doing so, Gwangju City will be reborn as the Mecca of next-generation information home appliance industry in the near future," he added.
Being a leader in the photonics and home appliance industries and forward thinking leadership makes the future look bright for Gwangju City.
