International Law

Korea All Over This Week?s Forbes (in Asia, at least)

My copy of Forbes Asia, dated October 27, 2008 turned up on Friday (no doubt having taken a detour somewhere around the office), but I only got around to looking at it over lunch. There are two good Korea-related pieces in this issue.

First up, Don Kirk took a trip to North Korea to visit the site of renewed construction at Pyongyang’s Ryugyong Hotel, the ghostly unfinished shell of a 102-storey hotel the construction of which was abandoned in 1992 after the collapse of worldwide communism left North Korea in a pinch—the markets for its odd industrial products, itchy blankets and ill-fitting suits having been lost when the Soviet Union finally gave up the ghost.

The Ryugyong is a favorite of journalists and tourists worldwide, due to the building neatly encapsulating everything freaky about North Korea’s autarky.

This is a story I missed over the summer, but North Korea Economy Watch’s been following it since February.

Kirk follows Egyptian engineer Mahmoud Fawzi of Orascom Telecom, which is working to finish off construction on the hotel. Orascom, as long-term Korea Law Blog readers might recall, is one of North Korea’s biggest recent investors. Why Orascom Telecom, instead of its sister company Orascom Construction Industries? Well, it seems that Orascom Telecom provides a 3G mobile-phone network for the use of the elite, and a 105-storey communications tower would provide great line-of-sight to nearly everywhere in the capital.

Methinks the project of “finishing” the hotel involves the installation of cladding over the bare top floors, and fake windows—maybe to include interior lighting, maybe not—over the rooms.

Orascom, by the way, can also provide those North Korean cadres with roaming service in Zimbabwe. They seem to have a long-term vision over there at Orascom.

Next up, South Korean portal champion NHN, operator of the nigh-unstoppable Naver. Its Chinese strategy is discussed, along with a story that reminds me, no matter how difficult it seems to do business in Korea, we’ve come a long way baby:

NHN sent Lee to China in 2003 to start a joint venture that planned to bid for the right to sell the tickets for the Beijing Olympics. But the Chinese partner stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from the venture and hired thugs to break into the office and steal more assets. He got into a fight with the thugs, fled by car and was chased through the city before escaping and going into hiding for ten days. Says Lee, sourly: “Those were fun days.”

Full post as published by Korea Law Blog on October 27, 2008 (boomark / email).