Transcript: Republic of Korea insights and opportunities
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Brett Cooper ‒ Senior Trade Commissioner Korea
Brett is Austrade’s Senior Trade Commissioner at the Australian Embassy in the Republic of Korea, known as South Korea. Brett is proficient in Korean and Japanese.
Prior to joining Austrade in 2011, he worked as a Senior Adviser at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in Canberra, where he was responsible for policy development and preparing advice for the Prime Minister across a range of international issues. He has also worked in the private sector as a management consultant, as well as for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra and the Netherlands.
Transcript
>>Brett Cooper: The Korean market is rapidly evolving. You have a hyper-aging society and you have a country which is increasingly outwards looking in terms of its desire to partner with foreign firms. You also have a wealthy, a very wealthy population which is looking to change its habits and its tastes in terms of what it eats and consumes as a population, and so all of these things are driving significant new opportunities and growth in emerging sectors which Australia is very well positioned to capitalise on. For example, the changing consumer patterns in terms of food is creating much more demand in premium product, in organic product and this is fortuitous for us because we have already a significant presence in the agriculture and the food and beverage market in South Korea.
The Korean market offers a broad range of opportunities across a number of sectors. The current trade structure is heavily focused and heavily built on commodities exports from Australia. Of the $22 billion that we exported to Korea last year, a very large proportion of that is iron ore and coal and other primary resources. However, the transformation of the South Korean economy, the transformation of their society is really creating opportunities in new sectors for Australian business.
I would summarise emerging sectors in probably four different areas: financial services, premium food and beverage and agribusiness, education – particularly global human capital, and finally, cultural infrastructure, and in particular opportunities around sporting events, for example, the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Finding the right local partner is absolutely critical to success in business in Korea and Austrade Korea can play a key role in helping Australian business find the right local partner, and we do this through setting up a program of meetings with prospective partners which we will help identify. We provide --- we have a very experienced team in Seoul and we can provide quite extensive market insight and analysis as well, and also the badge of government is something which carries significant weight in South Korea, although of course a good business case is at the end of the day the most important thing, we believe that representations on behalf of Australian clients can make a difference.
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