• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.17-34
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• 2001

This paper is to analyze how firms in a large firm-led industrial city have carried out the restructuring in the face of radical shifts, with focus on the strategy and the restructuring of firms in Ulsan, a typical industrial district in Korea that is specialized in heavy & chemical industry. It has been well known that the local economy has been led by a small number of large firms, including affiliates of chaebol, and its industrial structure has also been characterised as a clear dichotomy between large firms as a customer and small and medium-size firms as a supplier, which can be called not horizontal but vertical relations. It can identify some tendencies, however, that local companies have been rather dynamically changing in response to increasingly turbulent environment since the Asian crisis. Some are radical, but some incremental. These can be summarized in four distinctive but interlinked ways. First, more than half of local companies surveyed have attempted to change their production systems, mainly from the fordist mass production towards the flexible mass production, seeking both economies of scale and scope. Second, local firms have vigorously continued to reorganize the boundary of the production and the organization, by specializing products and focusing on the core competence in order to save costs and cope with radically changing customer demands in a flexible way. Third, there have been various strategies for the organizational innovation such as the introduction of team organization, the boundary blurring between the managerial and production workers and the intra-firm spin-offs, so as to improve managerial efficiency and competence in the use of internal labour market. Finally, they have tried to be more sensitive to the market and customers. These tendencies seem to be increasingly critical to sustain their competitiveness. To do so, they tend to focus increasingly not only on the competing via the product quality rather than through price, but also to seek to diversify the market and customer firms beyond national boundary.

• KOREAN JOURNAL OF CROP SCIENCE
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• v.60 no.3
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• pp.318-332
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• 2015

The maize production in South-eastern Asian countries showed a continuous increase with increasing poultry-livestock from the beginning of the 1990s to early 2010. Also the need for a new variety development of each contries was increased rapidly in the same period. Single-Cross hybrid varieties have been developed and supplied from 2001 instead of multi-cross maize varieties since 1992 in Indonesia. In Cambodia, CP group is mainly manufacturing feeds with most of the forage maize from farmers who are growing its seeds from the company. Cambodian main cultivars are varieties of multinational corporations such as DK8868 from Monsanto, NK6326, NK7328 from Syngenta and CP333 from CP group including local business company. Vietnam is the main maze importing country in South-Eastern Asia which had imported 13 times scale of amount compared to exports in average from 1990 to 2011. Vietnamese government has developed a range of varieties for improving their efficiency in production, such as the LVN-10 with political investments. Their production has been reached to 80% of the total. According to the 2012 MIFAFF (Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries) data in Korea, domestic edible maize cultivation area was approximately 15,000ha. It showed 74,399 tons of production, 3.8% of food self-sufficiency in maize and around 0.9% of grain self-sufficiency rate. The consumption of grain is mostly rely on imports in Korea. To overcome the limit of the domestic seed market and increase maize self-sufficiency, the need to develop maze varieties for world-class is increasing at present through analyzing the market trend and prospect of the seed industry in South-eastern Asia.