Grand Plans

 

Grand Korea Leisure (GKL, CEO Lim Byeong-soo), which runs the foreigner-only Seven Luck Casino held a ceremony for new corporate value declaration in September at the COEX Intercontinental Hotel located in Samsung-dong, Seoul. There, the company announced that it would contribute to the establishment of a healthy tourism ecosystem based on public casinos and attain three trillion won in annual sales by 2025.

“We set up a special task force in July and held three workshops and a number of in-house surveys to fix on the new company name, core value and vision,” GKL explained, adding, “Our raison d’etre is raise the public awareness of casino, contribute to a sound tourism ecosystem based on it and make a transparent, reliable and trusted public enterprise.”

GKL is engaged in a wide range of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities via the GKL Social Contribution Foundation, too. Established in May this year, the non-profit foundation is fully invested by GKL and the company earmarks 2% of its sales for the foundation each year. The investment reached 11 billion won in 2014. The foundation’s outreach projects include rice and kimchi sharing with elderly people living alone and children raised by grandparents, assistance for multicultural families wishing to visit home, volunteer activities led by the executive and staff members and projects for economic independence and education in Vietnam, Mongolia, Kenya and many other less-developed Asian and African countries. The UN Habitat Headquarters acknowledged its dedicated efforts this year by awarding a plaque of appreciation.

“We are trying to fulfill the cause of the foundation by means of sharing for value creation and social enrichment,” said GKL Foundation chairman Lee Deok-joo, continuing, “We are planning to focus more on art education for the underprivileged class, collection of ideas for social contribution and development of travel programs for the disadvantaged, etc.”

GKL, which is a subsidiary of the Korea Tourism Organization, was founded in 2005 and has run three Seven Luck casinos in Seoul and Busan since then. More than 1.6 million inbound foreign tourists visit the casinos a year.

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