Korea-Japan Cooperation To Improve in Private Sector

Cooperation between Korean and Japanese private companies is expected to increase in the near future. An agency for investment and cooperation between Japan and Korea opened inside the Korea Trade Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) on February 8. There is also a counterpart to this agency in Japan which has begun to operate.
Additionally, the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI) and the Federation of Japanese Business Organizations (FJBO) are jointly helping to prepare a bridge between companies of the two countries.
KOTRA will provide upgraded consulting services to Japanese companies for investment into Korea.
The FKI held a conference for Korean and Japanese businesses last December and Tokyo held a similar meeting in January of this year.
The FKI expects that cooperation between Japanese and Korean companies in the fields of petrochemicals, semiconductors, and auto parts to accelerate as a result of business structure improvement.
Many Japanese companies recently answered positively that they have an intention to invest in Korea within two to three years in a survey carried out by KOTRA.
Japanese investment in Korea was 58 percent and 50 percent in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively.
However, investment has shrunk to only four percent as Japan has been investing more heavily in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and China.