[Editorial] Samsung’s Technological Victory and the President’s Business Outlook

The happy news that Samsung Electronics has developed a product that confirms the company’s status as the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology coincided with the recent report of President Roh’s remark, “Now that I’m abroad, I realize again that a country is its corporations.”

The industry’s first 60 nanometer 8 Gigabit NAND flash memory device and the groundbreaking 80 nanometer 2 Gigabyte DDR2 SDRAM, both developed by Samsung, are critical weapons for conquering the next-generation semiconductor market. Such cutting-edge products will also facilitate the renovation and evolution of various related fields, like mobile communication, cellular phones, computers, and MP3 players. In effect, the success of Samsung as a corporation will lead to more jobs, more foreign investments, more export, and an increase in national wealth, ultimately producing more for the people of this country to live on. In this sense, the efforts of Samsung Electronics’ management leaders and technological brains are all the more precious.

Our corporations’ ability to meet repeated challenges and accumulate achievements in order to get ahead in the unlimited competition of the world market is directly linked to our nation’s most important undertaking, “the economic livelihood of its people.” Even President Roh, currently on a tour of Russia, stated before the dignitaries of the economic world who were accompanying him, “There are many tasks that a country must perform, but putting bread on the table is the first of them, and the economy is ultimately run by the businesses and corporations.”

If the president’s outlook on government prioritizes putting food on the nation’s collective table, and if he values corporations to the extent of equating them with the country itself, he must surely support such views with pertinent action. He must build “a nation where businesses thrive, a nation that invites investment” through both government and policy, instead of merely advocating it as a slogan. If he returns from his foreign tours and becomes the epicenter of party conflict and national discord once more, he will be steering the nation in the opposite direction, rendering his comments in Moscow about the importance of corporations into mere “lip service.”

In reality, it is impossible for a single administration to possess the unlimited resources and capabilities necessary to simultaneously pursue all of a nation’s myriad agendas. But it would be empty cant, a mere bit of sophistry, for a government to insist that it can easily solve the problem of the people’s livelihood even as their interest and potential are dispersed.

President Roh asserted that “what Russia wants is the investment of Korean companies.” But what is even more imperative is domestic investment. If the current state of affairs is neglected or exacerbated, what company, be it Korean or foreign, would want to invest in our domestic market? Above all, cementing a market economy based on a free democracy and eliminating apprehensions about the nation’s security will take us far on the road to building “a nation where businesses thrive” and providing for the livelihood of the people.