Silent Partners: Chinese Joint Ventures in North Korea - US-Korea ...

Silent Partners: Chinese Joint Ventures in North Korea Transcript 34
ethnic Korean living in Dandong, who’s basically spent most of his career doing business around
North Korea and he started out in the ‘90s with small-scale operations. He worked closely with
Yanbing, the Chinese guy who was named the head of the Sinuiju Export Processing Zone, so he
had a little deal going with them and then Yanbing got arrested and put away and the Sinuiju
joint-venture failed, so his venture failed. Then he set up a clothing factory, which I think was
using, he didn’t say it but indirectly, North Korean workers in this Dandong factory which is
used for export. And then that failed. Then he set up a little market right at the foot of the bridge
so that North Koreans could come and buy Chinese products and then take them back,
‘NorKmart’. And then they redeveloped the whole waterfront and the bridge, and he lost his
property, so this guy has been through it several times trying to make a living and he’s made a
living but he’s never really hit it big.
But he got a concession to open up a factory in Pyongyang that assembles trucks and buses, light
buses and small dump trucks, to service the Korean market and he’s allowed to import spare
parts from China, essentially complete kits, duty free, and assemble them in Pyongyang. And he
said he wasn’t going to make his sales target for last year, largely because of the currency
revaluation that occurred in December of 2009, when they basically took the currency and made
everybody turn it in and then gave back currency with one less zero on it. He said that stopped all
economic activity in the country until May, I think. He said basically, nothing happened between
January and May in the factory. Everyone still showed up and everyone still got paid but you
couldn’t get anything, just the whole country had stopped. So he said, that was hard but he said
since then, we’ve recovered, we started assembling, we sold our first few platforms, we got some
customers, we’re still figuring out the market and figuring out what sells best. And he said, we
fully expect to make a profit. He doesn’t have any competition. He doesn’t have competition in
that one segment, according to him. Now again, I’m not an expert in North Korea, I did not get
as much access to as many of the joint ventures as I would like, they were voluntary participants
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