By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
If you want to become a wine expert, you have to like it and drink it for years. If you want to be a robot expert, then you need to like robots and try to understand them for years.
Cho Won-tae (Wayne Cho), CEO of Izirobot, started drinking wine when he was working for a shipping company's New York branch two decades ago. ``I picked up a $3.50 wine on my way home, because whiskey was too strong for me,'' recalls Cho, who has become a wine connoisseur thereafter.
His passion for robots started accidentally, too. While he was working in the shipping and logistics field in 2000, his high school friend suggested he start up a robot business. ``After eight years in this field, I feel like an engineer myself,'' he said in an interview held in the firm's office in Seongnam, south of Seoul.
Cho was the chief executive of Fritz Companies, a shipping firm, until 2000. Then he ventured into the robot industry, taking the top seat of Izirobot. The friend who lured Cho to the robot field _ Kim Jong-hwan, professor of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, who is dubbed the father of robot football ― is the firm's technical advisor.
Since 2001, Cho and his staff at Izirobot have been making robotic pets, toy robots and educational robots. The robot's movement is simple and rudimentary when compared with similar products made by Japanese and American companies that have studied this field for decades. But Korean companies are fast in catching up, and they have a big chance to beat the competition by taking advantage of the country's strength in the information and communications technology, he said.
``Japan is far ahead of Korea in the mechanical aspect of robots. But making a selling robot is a different matter,'' he said. ``Robots have to be emotionally attractive to humans. What is important is the content ― what to do with these robots.''