Conglomerates to invest a bundle with small partners

The top 30 conglomerates will be investing 1.62 trillion won to smaller business partners to realize shared growth, the nation’s largest business lobby group Federation of Korean Industries (FKI) said yesterday. This is 3.8 percent, or 58.5 billion won more than last year’s.

According to the federation among the investments spending on training and educating employees will see the biggest increase of 19 percent from a year earlier. Spending on research and development trails behind with 9 percent and followed by improving productivity with 7.6 percent. Last year’s investment on business partners amounted to 1.56 trillion won. This is a 1.4 percent increase from the previous year. Leading companies aligned with the government’s shared growth campaign in recent years have been ramping up support to smaller business partners.

Samsung Electronics since 2010 have been running a program enhancing the competitiveness of small business partners. As a result 47 business partners of the leading electronics company achieved a combined revenue of 530 billion won. Leading automaker Hyundai Motor last year became the first company to hold an exclusive job fair for business partners. The business partners were able to hire 15,000 employees.