News
The Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) established the Global M&A Support Center to assist small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Korea with global market penetration.
The agency announced on February 4 that it opened the support center at the Invest Korea Plaza located in Yeomgok-dong, Seoul. The opening ceremony was attended by more than 60 persons from the government, domestic and foreign financial institutions, private equity funds, venture capitals, accounting firms, etc.
These days, countries around the world are making use of M&A as their strategy to tide over the ongoing global economic recession. Particularly, China and Japan are bending over backwards to buy foreign companies with the governments backing. Last year alone, Japan bought 515 foreign firms at an investment of approximately 7.3 trillion yen, the highest record in its history. The amount reached US$57.2 billion for China, a new record for it as well.
Under the circumstances, Korean firms are also paying increasing attention to cross-border M&A. According to the recent survey by the KOTRA, 12% of the 1,366 SMEs that participated in it answered that they were interested in international M&A, mentioning the lack of information as to promising cross-border M&A targets as the biggest hurdle to their efforts.
It is in this context that the KOTRA set up the organization to support SME’s global market penetration. It is going to respond to their globalization demand while finding out M&A targets overseas in conjunction with the KOTRA’s trade centers worldwide so that small businesses in Korea can expand their overseas business and contribute to job creation.
“We’ll help accelerate small firms’ global market penetration by means of M&A support, brand awareness enhancement and sales and production network expansion,” said KOTRA CEO Oh Young-ho, adding, “We’re planning to provide our support for overseas business expansion to approximately 10,000 companies a year and concentrate our resource on small-scale M&A so small business can make better use of the assistance.”
He continued, “Our trade centers all around the world will find promising M&A targets abroad and offer the information to M&A service providers while establishing a database covering legal and accounting consulting firms and tightening cooperation with the private sector.”