By Kim Tong-hyung
No player in the Korean banking industry manages to come closer than Shinhan Bank, when it comes to skillful profit turning.
However, the inability to work its magic outside the domestic market has been a nagging weakness Shinhan shares with its rivals.
Suh Jin-won, the bank’s chief executive officer (CEO), openly hangs his legacy as a bank leader on arming Shinhan’s business with a passport, so to speak.
In a recent interview with The Korea Times, Suh, who took the management helm at the bank about a year ago, was comfortable in claiming that it was starting to earn its global stripes.
Most of the visible results can be seen in Asian nations such as Japan, China, Vietnam, India and Indonesia, which Suh sees as the beginnings of a lucrative regional financial body.
Shinhan is looking beyond just corporate customers in these countries as it aims to be a true consumer brand, experimenting with retail banking and credit card services and scanning for merger and acquisition (M&A) opportunities in different markets, Suh said.
Shinhan has more than 60 business units in 14 countries around the world and is planning to add six to seven more this year.
While the worsening global conditions have made this an awkward time to talk about going global, Suh is eager to exploit the softened competition, although he admits the company will have to choose locations more carefully.
“The plan is to generate at least 10 percent of our revenue from overseas by 2015 and we are on course to achieve the goal. Our foreign business units combined to generate more than 5 percent of our revenue last year, and since business operations in our three key markets of Japan, China and Vietnam have been strong so far, I have high hopes for this year,” said Suh in his ninth-floor office at Shinhan’s headquarters in Seoul.
“We believe the countries that we are already in will provide the foundation that will allow us to spread further across the world markets. The idea is to strengthen our positions in these core markets and use that strength to expand, rather than going here and there and spreading ourselves too thin,” he added.
“Our approach to international markets could be summarized as ‘glocalization.’ We will continue to be involved in business areas where we are the best, but also put in more efforts to tailor these services and make them attractive to local customers in each market.”
Suh, who has worked with Shinhan since 1983, serves as the right-hand man of Shinhan Financial Group Chairman Han Dong-woo, who took the management helm in December 2010 after an internal feud between former top executives led to their disgraceful exits. Suh took office shortly after Han’s appointment.
Shinhan Financial earlier this year extended Suh’s role as CEO for three more years, highly rating his efforts to mend the emotional scars left from the internal management bickering and restoring the bank in its top money-making form.
Last year Shinhan Bank set a new record of 2.12 trillion won (about $1.8 billion) in annual profit to become the first Korean bank to crack the symbolic 2 trillion won mark.