Touring South Korean Companies (Day 1)

At the end of October I was invited to join the SME (small to medium enterprise) Conference and youth leadership camp which included two days of touring South Korean businesses. The first day included a tour of: CJ Foodville, Samsung, & YG Logistics, followed by a night spent at the IBK Bank Training Facility in Cheongju (청주). The second day there was a presentation by IBK Bank followed by tours of Hyundai and Korea East-West Power.

We met in Gangnam and hopped on the bus to CJ Foodville in Seoul. As it turns out CJ Foodville used to be a branch of Samsung until the 1990s when it separated to focus on Food, Entertainment, and Pharmaceuticals. When we arrived we were given a tour of the food court composed entirely of CJ brands: BiBiGo, Loco Curry, VIPS (restaurant chain), Tous Les Jours (bakery franchise), Seafood Ocean, A Twosome Place (Coffee & Desert Cafe), Cold stone (ice cream parlor chain). After a presentation on the CJ Foodville values we were fed a meal at the VIPS buffet which was quite tasty.

VIPS

After that visit we got on the bus and drove to Samsung where we were taken on a tour of the Samsung Innovation Museum.

They had some displays of the history of Samsung at the entrance.

Olympic Torches

They had a display of Olympic torches alongside the Samsung phone from that year which was neat.

Here is the whole crew for the two tour days. We got to know each other fairly well over the course of two days.

We then proceeded through the museum to see the history of innovation.

World’s first Television from 1930

Curved UHD TV

TVs are much bigger now and sometimes curved. I’m not sure why they are curved but this one is and has lots of pixels.

Mobile Phones

They had a section on the history of mobile phones as well.

Portable phones and radios

Car Phone

Lots of different ground breaking phones from different brands.

They had some interesting displays on the history of semi-conductors. Unfortunately none of my photos from that area turned out.

The latest Samsung TV’s show rubber ducks well

Young Kook one of my fellow Hanyang students posed with me in these photos.

It was a pretty big museum. I was ready to see something else when we were done.

After that we all piled back into the buss and headed to Incheon to check out a drill bit factory YG-1. The YG logistics building is where they organize and ship all the drill bits.

At the factory there are hundreds of C&C machines milling drill bits and creating and cutting tools to cut other materials. They also had a section where they created replacement joints. Unfortunately after I took this photo I was asked not to take photos inside the factory.

These are the types of drill bits they make. I got this photo off their website. They had lots of different shapes and sizes of drill bits and they coated them with lots of different materials for different reasons. They had a blue coating that seemed merely cosmetic but they were very proud of and did look nice.

After that tour we got on the bus and drove two hours to Cheongju were the IBK Bank Training Facility is located and where we would be staying for the night.

After dinner and cleaning up we took advantage of the Karaoke rooms that were loaded with free snacks and lots of good songs.