“Koreans share many characteristics with Germans”

Susanne Woehrle worked for BMW for 25 years and now works in vocational training for the German Chamber of Commerce in Seoul. She points to the lifestyle, the excellent public transport system and the landscape as to why she loves life there so much.

“Language-wise,” she says, “you can get by with English because lots of people speak it very well. And if not, I use a mixture of Korean, German and English.”

She sees many similarities between recent Korean history and German post-war life, noting the parallels to Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder. “Koreans are open-minded and curious — they share many characteristics with Germans,” she says. “They are very focused, disciplined, ambitious and they work hard.” The Korean “obsession with technology” astonishes her, though she says that technological advancements haven’t always been matched in wider societal contexts, such as gender equality, including in the workplace. Woehrle has tips for business ⋅ etiquette in South Korea: “Some Koreans are very familiar with shaking hands, but others are ⋅ very traditional and only bow.

“The first thing you do is exchange business cards. This is a major point: if you don’t have a business card, it looks very bad, but it’s also how you can identify the hierarchy. “If you’re unsure how to act at a meeting, it’s better to hesitate a bit at the beginning — then Koreans will usually offer you a handshake, or they just offer you their business cards and then you bow. “Remember, there is no personal contact such as hugging. There is always some kind of distance. “Keep to the hierarchical order if you want to achieve something. “Even as a visitor, remember that personal relationships and networks are very important. For Koreans, it is very important who went to school [and university] with whom.

“If you visit a restaurant, the youngest and those lowest in the hierarchy sit furthest away from the middle of the table. This is the same in business meetings: in the middle are the most important people, and to the edges or outside the table you have the people who are lower in the hierarchy.”

Leading in technology

By the time Kim Young Sam became the country’s first freely elected president, in 1993, South Korea had long started to turn its economy towards the high-tech and IT sectors. This has paid dividends in a big way. According to the OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2017, between 2012 and 2015, China, Chinese Taipei, Korea, Japan and the US developed between 70 and 100 per cent of the “top 20 cutting-edge ICT [information and communication technology] technologies”.

Japan and Korea were highlighted as having innovated across the whole spectrum of ICT technologies. Over the same period, Japan, Korea and the US filed 62 per cent of the 18,000 artificial intelligence (AI) patents worldwide. South Korea is also a world leader in robotics; the International Federation of Robotics reported that, in 2016, South Korea had 631 robot workers for every 10,000 human workers in its manufacturing industry and 2,145 for every 10,000 in the automobile industry. In the same year, South Korea sold around 41,000 robots worldwide, second only to China, with around 87,000 robots sold.

The country’s highly skilled, productive workforce and its long-term strategy of focusing on high technology means it is now a market leader in memory chip and LCD technology, for example. And it has world-class firms across various sectors, such as Samsung (electronics), Hyundai and Daewoo (both cars), SK Hynix (semiconductors), POSCO (steel) and LG Chem (chemicals).

Financial crisis

Still, it hasn’t all been plain sailing. In 1997, the Asian financial crisis forced South Korea to take $58 billion from the IMF to save the country from possible bankruptcy. As a result, South Koreans famously donated gold items (including countless wedding rings, sports medals and traditional “luck keys”) to be melted down and sold on the international markets. In just two months, gold worth $2.2 billion, weighing 226 metric tons, was handed in to help pay off the IMF loan.

Today, South Korea is a highly developed, tech-focused economy, though one within a rigid hierarchical society. It has major challenges in the area of gender equality, and huge corporate corruption scandals have regularly made headlines. In April 2018, former president Park Geun-hye was sentenced to 24 years in prison for corruption and coercion. And on top of a very low birth rate, South Korea has the worst income inequality of 22 Asia–pacific countries. While life expectancy (of women) might reach an average of 90 by 2030 (the world’s highest),