In Hot Pursuit of Global No. 1 Players
Korean companies have significantly narrowed their sales gaps with the global No. 1 players in their business fields over the past five years, a survey has found.
CEO Score, a corporate evaluation website, has recently compared sales of Korea's No. 1 companies against global No. 1 companies in 19 industries from 2014 to 2019. The comparison found that the gap narrowed in eight sectors –- chemical, pharmaceutical, electronics commerce, automobile, food and beverage, distribution, cosmetics and semiconductor industries.
E-commerce was the industry where Korean companies posted the highest sales growth rate over the five-year period. Coupang, the nation's No. 1 player, saw its sales jump 1,952.5 percent to 7,153.1 billion won from 348.5 billion won in 2014. The sales gap between Coupang and Amazon, the world's top company in this category, narrowed to 45.7 times in 2019 from 268.9 times in 2014. Amazon's sales grew 248.9 percent to 326.99 trillion won in 2019 from 93.72 trillion won in 2014.
In the food and beverage sector, sales of Korea's CJ CheilJedang swelled 91.0 percent over the five years against a mere 3.0 percent of Nestle, the global champion. Their sales gap was reduced from 9.0 times to 4.9 times.
In the chemical business, LG Chem saw its sales climb 26.8 percent over the five-year period, while global No. 1 BASF suffered a 25.6 percent fall. The gap between the two was narrowed from 4.6 times to 2.7 times.
In the retail sector, E-Mart's sales rose 44.9 percent over the five years, narrowing the gap with global front-runner Wal-Mart from 38.9 times to 32 times.
In the pharmaceutical industry, Korean top-ranker Yuhan Corp. posted an increase of 44.5 percent in sales, narrowing the gap with global champion Roche from 56.4 times to 50.5 times.
In the semiconductor business, the gap between first-ranked Intel Corp. and the second-ranking Samsung Electronics DS Division slid from 1.5 times to 1.3 times.
Sales of Naver, Korea's No. 1 search portal, grew 139 percent from 2,758.5 billion won to 6,593.4 billion won, but fell short of the growth of Google, global number one search giant. Sales of Alphabet which operates Google grew 171.4 percent from 69,513.6 billion won in 2014 to 188.668.6 billion won in 2019, widening the gap from 25.2 times to 28.6 times.
Korea had only one company that ranked first in sales in an industry in the world. Samsung Electronics came in first in sales in the global consumer electronics sector in 2019. However, its gap with Media of China that ranked second in the world decreased from 2.1 times to 1.1 times.