South Korea Inc is building up to enter the world telecommunications equipment market in a big way, taking advantage of the overvalued yen to steal share from the Japanese, according to a report drawn up about the South Korean industry by market research company Pyramid Research of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The report claims that Korean companies are developing equipment ranging from telephone handsets to large public exchanges like the Korean-designed TDX-1 digital switch, which has already won a contract in the Philippines. The move is funded in part from the country’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, which has a budget of $55m this year. Korea’s share of the US keysystem market has grown to 19% in 1987 from 2% in 1983. It will be using its success here and in personal computers to spearhead its entry into the US telecoms market – where it will sell primarily PABXs, office automation kit, transmission products and videophones. The country’s manufacturers, Lucky Goldstar, Samsung, Oriental Precision, Hyundai and Daewoo aim to sell public switches to third world countries. They are also building bigger PABXs, which should raise output to the equivalent of 1.1m lines in 1991 from 800,000 lines in 1986. And for the biggest growth area, the 100-line and under market, manufacturers intend to bring out low cost PABXs for the US. Korea also doubled expenditure to modernise its own domestic telphone network in the early 1980s.
