[THE INVESTOR] Hyosung Group president Cho Hyun-joon appears to be upping the ante to further expand into the Chinese textile market where his firm already has a growing presence.

Cho -- one of Hyosung chairman Cho Seok-rae’s sons -- is mainly in charge of the conglomerate’s textile and IT sectors.

Hyosung is currently No. 1 in terms of market share in China’s spandex industry. 

 

To seal this position, Cho has recently been seeking ways to widen its business ties with influential Chinese cities.

On July 19, he was in China to meet with Communist Party Secretary Chen Shin to discuss Hyosung’s ongoing investment in the city’s textile and Nitrogen trifluoride, or NF3 industries. NF3 is a nonflammable gas used as an etchant in microelectronics.

Elected in 2012, Chen is the youngest secretary of the city. Since then, he has been fostering an industrial cluster focused on biochemical businesses.

Hyosung is currently erecting a spandex plant capable of producing an annual 16,000 tons of spandex and another facility producing 1,500 tons of NF3 a year.

These mark the first investment made by a Korean company in the city’s related industries.

Hyosung runs a total of six branch offices in China, along with 18 production and sales plants. In Guangdong Province, Nautilus Hyosung -- an automatic teller machine manufacturer -- has a production plant. 

Cho first began to strategize entering the Chinese market in the late 1990s when he said penetration would be imperative for Hyosung’s long-term goal to become the world’s No. 1 in the spandex industry.

In 2002, the company opened a spandex plant in China. Five years later, it accounted for the largest market share for spandex there. And since 2010, under Cho’s leadership, Hyosung has maintained its position as the world’s largest spandex manufacturer. In 2015, the operating profit of the textile arm accounted for 44.7 percent of Hyosung’s profit, according to regulatory filings.

As head of IT operations, Cho also established an automatic teller machine manufacturing plant in China in 2015. 

Meanwhile internally, Cho is stuck in a family feud with his brother Hyun-moon who filed a suit against Hyun-joon for irregularities including amassing slush funds.

By Kim Ji-hyun (jemmie@heraldcorp.com)