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Seoul fashion market to build North
Korean plant
SEOUL - A
popular fashion market in Seoul is turning to
cheap North Korean labor as it explores ways of
shoring up its rapidly shrinking competitive edge,
industry sources said Tuesday.
Dongdaemun
Fashion Town, a block of winding alleys and modern
buildings, has made a name for itself as a
shopping haven for foreigners as well as local
people eager to buy high-quality clothes at
relatively low prices.
Some 2 million
foreigners visit the market a year, prompting the
Seoul city government to designate it as a special
tourism district. But the number of visitors has
been decreasing in recent years, as prices offered
there are not as attractive as they once were.
As a solution, the market is pushing to
build a manufacturing facility at an industrial
park being built at North Korea's border city of
Kaesong for garment and other labor-intensive
South Korean businesses.
One big
attraction of the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a
symbol of inter-Korean reconciliation, is its
offer of cheap but skilled North Korean labor,
about one-twentieth of that in South Korea.
Two small South Korean firms making
kitchenware and automobile parts opened shop there
late last year, and 13 more are expected to follow
suit in the first half of this year.
Dongdaemun Fashion Town, with a total of
31,500 shops, has drawn up a plan to build a
production facility in Kaesong on a 20,000-30,000
pyeong land. (One pyeong equals 3.3 square
meters.)
"Geographically, the Kaesong
Industrial Complex has more advantages than
China," Song Byong-yeol, a general director of the
market's management, said. "We both speak the same
language and distribution and other costs are
cheaper."
Song said his association plans
to send a study team to Kaesong, about 60
kilometers from Seoul, the South Korean capital.
The city sits just outside the northern boundary
of the 4-kilometer-wide Demilitarized Zone that
separates the two Korean states.
Meanwhile, South and North Korea are
scheduled to hold working-level talks this week on
installing cross-border communications networks
for Southern firms in Kaesong, officials said
Tuesday.
During the January 26-27 talks in
Kaesong, the two sides are expected to discuss
ways to build communications networks across the
Cold War's last frontier, said officials.
Last year, the two sides agreed to set
telephone and fax charges at less than US50 cents
a minute.
(Asia Pulse/Yonhap) |
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