Moreover, electronics is playing a leading role in turning industrial society into an information society in the 21st century. The electronics industry was in fact launched in the 1900s -- the diode electron tube was invented in 1904 and the triode electron tube in 1906. But it was not until around 1940 when the term "electronics industry" was first used. As it turned out, the electronics industry has developed in an extremely short period and has emerged as an industry that takes the biggest share of the global market.
During the early years of its electronics industry, Korea was in the primitive stage of simply assembling vacuum tube model AM radios. Despite Korea's later start than advanced economies, the electronics industry has contributed significantly to the country emerging as the world's 12th largest economy. Korea is currently taking the lead in the world's electronics and IT industries as a major supplier of numerous high-tech products. In this process, Korean electronics engineers have devoted their energy and efforts to a point beyond the imagination.
This year, we mark the 50th anniversary of Korea's launching of the electronics industry. In retrospect, the late 1950s, when the electronics industry was launched, were years of hardship and poverty as people had to work to make a bare livelihood and find ways to survive from the ashes of the Korean War, with the help of foreign aid. At the time, Korea had nothing to develop its industry with, having no capital, technologies, manpower, market or raw materials.
With a view to producing Korean radios to replace imported ones, Korean industrialists finally succeeded in assembling vacuum tube AM radios for the first time in 1959 with the spirit of creating something out of nothing. They eventually exported such radios to the United States in 1962. This planted the seeds of growth for the country's electronics industry.
With the Electronics Industry Promotion Act coming into force in 1969, enterprises began making earnest capital investment and production. Exports of electronics products exceeded US$1 billion in 1976 and US$10 billion in 1987. The electronics industry finally topped the list of exporting industries in 1988 by overtaking the textile industry that had been the largest exporting industry up until that time.
In the 1990s, Korea was ranked among the world's advanced electronics-producing nations, due to its painstaking efforts to streamline and expand its electronics industry's structure, with a focus on developing technologies and high-tech, high value-added products such as semiconductors, computers and communications goods.
The country's electronics industry has grown rapidly despite difficult circumstances in such a short period of time thanks to the government's unsparing support and engineers' uninterrupted research efforts.
The electronics industry is indisputably the most important strategic industry of the country, given the adverse environment in which there aren't sufficient resources and the nature of the industry in which technologies, knowledge and labor are integrated.
The significance of reminiscing about the 50-year history of Korea's electronics industry may lie in learning a lesson from the past and planning for the next 50 years to create a new history with the hope that the electronics industry of the country will emerge as a leading player in the global market.
