Park led industrialization

By Kim Tong-hyung

Korea experienced a profound transformation of its economy and society in the 1960s, with the export-oriented industrialization strategy driven by Park Chung-hee and his military government producing a magnitude of change that took a whole century for Western economies.

In what was one of the most compressed processes of industrialization the world has ever seen, millions of farmers and their children were converted into wage workers for urban factories that began to lay the building blocks of a regional economic power.

Park Tae-joon, founder and former chairman of Korean steel giant POSCO, who died Tuesday at age 84, was among the first businesspeople in this era to emerge as a transcendent personality, personally epitomizing the country’s rapid transition into a modern industrialized state.

At helm of what swiftly became one of the country’s great industrial groups, Park, dubbed as ``Steel King’’ by the local media, developed a reputation for his aggressiveness and abrasive style as an executive. Many have credited his assertiveness for keying POSCO’s emergence as a global giant in it industry.

Park also leveraged his reputation as a founding father of Korea Inc. to pursue political ambitions. Leaving POSCO in 1993, Park led an illustrious political career, elected to the parliament four different times and serving as the prime minister in 2000 under the Kim Dae-jung government. However, he was forced to resign from the post after a few months in the fallout of a tax scandal.

Despite his disgraceful exit from politics, Park’s legacy will always be defined as the architect of the country’s robust steel industry.

When he first established POSCO in Pohang in 1968, Park had 34 employees and some real-estate in the sandy coastlines of the southeastern port city. The country was annually producing more than 5 million tons of steel just a decade later and is now the world’s third-largest steel maker behind ArcelorMittal and Baosteel.

Of course, it would be hard to pin POSCO’s success entirely on the brilliance of Park. He benefited greatly from political support, as the country’s military leaders believed that the country establishing self-sufficiency in steel and a global muscle in steelworks would be critical to economic development.

However, it’s also clear that Park enjoyed full trust from authorities as the man who could get the job done, and eventually delivered.

A critical moment for POSCO came in 1969, when Park embarked on an ambitious plan to build an integrated steel mill in Pohang, although the country didn’t possess a modern steel plant to that point.

With the help of government support, as well as financial and technology support from Japan, Park pulled off what the World Bank then described as an overly ambitious project into one of the world’s largest steel plants over the next two decades. POSCO made nearly 32.6 trillion won (about $28 billion) in revenue and 4.2 trillion won in profit last year, while churning out 37 million tons of steel.