쌍용건설

Chairman Kim spends time with employees in remote construction sites overseas in wake of year-end and New Year seasons

During a five-day visit to India, Kim encourages employees and their families
Ancestor memorial service with on-site employees … talks with India’s largest development company on cooperation
On-site management … winning the biggest-ever foreign construction order

Ssangyong Engineering & Construction Chairman Kim Seok-joon, known for his management style of sharing time with employees in remote construction sites overseas in the wake of year-end and New Year holiday seasons, plans to visit an expressway construction site in India this year.

From Dec. 29, 2007 to Jan. 2, 2008, Kim plans to make the visit to the Indian site to build a 179-kilometer highway named the North-South Corridor. In 2006, Ssangyong Engineering won an order from the Indian government to build four parts of the five-part construction project. During the five-day visit, Kim will spend about 40 hours in planes and cars.

After arriving at Delhi on Dec. 29, Kim will move to the construction sites of the North-South Corridor, located in Madhya Pradesh province on a three-hour domestic flight and a vehicle trip of five and a half hours. On Dec. 31, Kim plans to have dinner with some 40 employees and their families to help encourage them.

During the visit, Kim will meet major property developers in India, including DLF, and discuss cooperation.

On Jan. 1, Kim will hold an ancestor-memorial service with employees and return home. On Jan. 2, Kim will hold the opening ceremony for the year at the company’s headquarters in Seoul.

“Kim will visit the remote construction sites because the top priority of his management philosophy is to encourage employees in remote areas though it comes at a sensitive time as work is underway for the company’s merger and acquisition,” an official at Ssangyong Engineering said. “In particular, there is no appropriate accommodation at this year’s destination. So, Kim will sleep and eat together with employees at the site’s temporary lodgings and hear about their difficulties.”

Since 1983, when Kim took the top job at Ssangyong Engineering, he has visited foreign construction sites every Chuseok full-moon harvest and New Year holiday seasons. In 1992, when he visited a plant construction site in Iran, he took five flights a day. In the 1986 visit to 10 construction sites in three nations, he spent 54 hours in planes and vehicles during the 72-hour trip.

Such on-site management practices helped Ssangyong Engineering win a $700 million order to build the Marina Bay Sands Hotel last September, marking the biggest-ever foreign construction contract in the 40-year history of the Korean construction industry.

From the beginning, Kim had played a leading role to win the order. When a high-ranking official from the client got sick and didn’t show up in a meeting with Kim in Singapore, Kim personally visited the official’s home and cheered him up. In the wake of the visit, Ssangyong Engineering and the client built a solid relationship and eventually helped the company win the order.