BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : OCTOBER 23, 2000 ISSUE
BUSINESS WEEK E.BIZ -- STRATEGIES Korea's B2B King (int'l edition) On second thought, maybe the Asian financial crisis wasn't all bad. At Samsung Corp. (SSNHY), South Korea's largest trade broker, Lim Young Hak, then the company's director of corporate planning, saw in December, 1997, that Samsung needed to take advantage of the Web. Asia's financial meltdown persuaded the board to rally behind his plan. So the company spent $45 million over the next two years to make the Net its main business tool and slashed its workforce from 11,500 to 4,700. Now, Samsung is going one step further. It's inviting hundreds of industrial companies to band together to create a handful of powerful electronic marketplaces--Web sites where buyers and sellers can barter. To Lim, this is a natural transition. ''Trading houses have all the trappings for e-marketplaces,'' he says. Samsung already has rounded up 53 Asian chemical companies to join in a B2B Web site called ChemCross.com. In March, it formed Global Steel Exchange, a joint venture with Cargill of the U.S., Switzerland's Duferco Group, and Luxembourg's Tradearbed, to handle online buying and selling of steel. And two other global e-marketplaces are on a test run: FishRound.com for frozen fish and other seafood, and Textopia.com for textiles. Samsung is racing to catch up with e-marketplaces in the U.S. and Europe. All its sites will be running by the end of this year. Come 2001, Samsung expects its B2B sites will have a combined transaction volume of $11.5 billion, jumping to $33 billion in 2003, when it hopes to make more than $300 million through its cut of transaction fees and service charges. Lim isn't doing badly, either. He's now in charge of Samsung's e-commerce business. By Moon Ihlwan _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS EBIZ Contents for issue dated Oct. 23, 2000 Asia's Internet Deficit (int'l edition) CHART: Asia Execs Tiptoe into E-Commerce TABLE: Playing Catch-Up (int'l edition) Prodding Singapore (int'l edition) Revving Up in India (int'l edition) Korea's B2B King (int'l edition) Drug Coup in China? (int'l edition) ONLINE EXTRA: Q&A with Gartner Group's Lane Leskela INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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