Cultivating Alaska-Korea commerce.

• Author: Richardson, Jeffrey
• Position: Includes information on trade associations

Cultivating Alaska-Korea Commerce

TRAVELING FROM SEWARD to Fairbanks to a meeting with Usibelli Coal officials, Bill Noll, vice president of Suneel Alaska Corp., pauses to reflect on 10 years of trying to get Alaskan coal to Korean markets. In December 1980, a 30-000-metric-ton test shipment departed the Port of Anchorage, capping several years of ground-breaking effort by Korean business pioneer Tae Il Kim, founder and president of Suneel Shipping Co., Suneel Alaska's parent firm.

"It was hard to do, but in a sense it was adventurous and fun," Noll remembers.

After the ship cast off, Suneel and Anchorage continued discussing long-term prospects for loading future shipments. Despite much good will, Suneel decided the Anchorage port option was not feasible.

The Alaska Railroad suggested Seward, and a courtship began that culminated in another shipload of Usibelli coal departing for Korea, this time from Suneel's modern coal-loading facility at the Port of Seward. That was 1985.

Today, Noll, also the mayor of Seward, says the Alaska-Korean connection has an important future. One reason he cites is a natural affinity between the two peoples. "Koreans are a lot like Alaskans. They work hard, play hard. They like to be outdoors. They love hunting and fishing," he explains.

Noll calls Koreans "positive thinkers" and credits that attribute with helping to launch the economic dynamism that has made Korea an important force in world trade and industry. "The Korean miracle didn't happen without reason," he adds.

It is that miracle that has made Korea Alaska's number two trading partner after Japan, a distinction somewhat mitigated by the wide gap between Japanese and Korean trade volumes with Alaska.

Says Robert Breeze, an Anchorage attorney with a practice in international commerce, "Korea has developed quite rapidly during the last 15 years. It has been probably in the last five years that Korea has become a trading image in the Alaskan mind."

Between 1986 and 1988, the total value of Alaskan exports to Korea grew by nearly $30 million, from $140 million to $169.8 million. The 1989 value of Alaskan exports to Korea was $174 million. In 1986, petroleum products and coal led the list of exports to Korea. In 1989, primary exports were timber, $44.5 million; petroleum products, $26.6 million; and coal, $25.0 million.

Predictably, the economic rise of Korea bears considerable resemblance to the successes of its Asian neighbors: Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong, all resource-poor nations that have become world profit centers by relying on the so-called import-substitution, export-led growth model.

The most visible agents of Korea's industrialization have been the handful of family-owned conglomerates known as chaebol. Americans know them as Samsung, Hyundai, and Daewoo. They were initially backed - during the rule of Park Chung-Hee in the '60s and '70s - by huge injections of government credit, subsidized loans, tax breaks and semimonopolies.

Although they once enjoyed heroic reputations for modernizing and bringing prosperity to the country, chaebol leaders are increasingly seen as robber barons and many of their financial practices are under scrutiny. There is concern about an unhealthy concentration of wealth and influence among the chaebol.

The '80s brought to Korea a vigorous democratization process and a surging labor movement, resulting in the country's first (relatively) peaceful political transition. As host for the 1988 Olympics, Seoul also had the opportunity to showcase its economic progress.

According to John Kim, University of Alaska professor and executive director of the Alaska Center for International Business, the progress is real. He says per-capita income has grown from about $86 per year in 1962 to nearly $5,000 last year. Perhaps more striking is that per-capita income - at...