Hansae seeks new sources of growth and vows reform

Hansae Vice Chairman Kim Ik-whan [HANSAE]

Hansae Vice Chairman Kim Ik-whan pledged to discover new growth engines and create an innovative corporate culture in celebration of the company’s 40th anniversary on Wednesday.

Established in 1982, Hansae is an apparel company specialized in production and export. Its global partners include Gap, H&M and American Eagle.

Hansae “will continue to strive to achieve future growth by raising work efficiency through the state of the art IT technologies and by adopting a fair evaluation system focused on achievements."

Hansae, which also runs an online bookstore Yes24, entered the web content market by acquiring Bookpal as part of its strategy to diversify its cultural contents business.

Bookpal is a platform for webtoon and web novels.

Kim started working at Hansae in 2004. The Hansae Advanced Management System enables the real-time monitoring of data of factories around the world.

Hansae reported 29.37 billion won ($22.3 million) in net profit in the third quarter from 2.69 billion won in net loss in the same period a year earlier. Its revenue was 588. 28 billion won in the July-September period, up 41 percent on year.

Hansae said it expects the annual revenue this year to surpass 2 trillion won.

The company's stock is down 34 percent over the past year and 38 percent over the past 5 years.

BY JIN MIN-JI [jin.minji@joongang.co.kr]