SK Group said it will participate in a large-scale environmental cleanup business in China in coordination with a group of Korean subcontractors.
The group’s coming advancement into the Chinese government-led environment sector comes after the country unveiled its project to invest about $530 billion in environmental protection over the next four years.
SK Group’ inroads into the overseas business feature group chairman Chey Tae-won’s commitment to “shared growth” with subcontractors.
For the overseas business, SK recently forged pacts for close coordination with 21 local small and mid-sized enterprises holding high-end technologies while working in major Chinese cities.
Chey has continued to stress that large and small companies need to break out of the traditional boundaries of the contractor-subcontractor relationship to bring about shared-growth.
“The conventional thinking that subcontractors were in a subordinate position to large companies should be discarded for shared-growth and to improve relations between the two,” he told group executives.
SK Group has increased the fund established for SMEs by 80 billion won ($88 million) to 230 billion won.
The additional funds were raised by SK Telecom, SK Global Chemical and a financial institution.
The SK Group subsidiaries put together 32 billion won. The fund was established in 2009 with 120 billion won, with SK Group and Industrial Bank of Korea each raising 60 billion won. The fund was then raised to 150 billion won.
Concerning the expansion of the fund, SK spokespeople said that support for SMEs was a management principle.
A spokesman said that establishing a “continuous and efficient platform for shared growth” was the main objective of the fund.
“The fund has been used to provide small and medium-sized SK Group suppliers with loans of up to 3 billion won. The interest rate is lowered by up to 2.4 percentage points from the rates an SME is offered from financial institutions,” he said.
He also said that applying the maximum reduction in interest rates, an SME with a 3 billion won loan stands to save 72 million won in interest payments per year.
According to the group, around 300 SMEs have taken out loans from the fund.
By Kim Yon-se (
kys@heraldcorp.com)
