irishcar.com - Daewoo recovery

It was a slow queue to immigration. Very slow. And some 40 minutes after he landed, Tom McQueirns finally got to hand up his passport to the official at Seoul Airport.

“Business or pleasure?”

“Business. I represent the Daewoo franchise in Ireland.”

The officer looked up sharply and closed the passport with a slap. The military type beside him with the menacing gun also straightened up. Tom braced for the unexpected.

And got it. For another rigorous 20 minutes. A strong monologue about Daewoo, and how he ‘must stick with the brand’.

It WILL come all right, he was told in no uncertain terms by the immigration officer. “It IS a good product, and you must not think of dropping it.”

This happened when the Korean company was bankrupt, and very publicly in need of capital injection. And, ironically, when the Daewoo franchisees in Ireland had managed in just 30 months to bring the brand into the top ten marques in Ireland.

The military type nodded agreement, his expression getting more grim as the monologue went on. The gun took on a whole new meaning. And Tom wondered what those waiting in the queue behind him were thinking.

Eventually his passport was stamped and he was allowed through. But it was only his first experience of South Korea under pressure. He was to learn much more about a people whose commitment puts even Japanese famous work practices into the second division. His conclusions say a lot about different work cultures around the world.

“The Japanese will put in a day from 7am to 8pm, but they might only do an actual five hours of work in that time,” he says. “Their Korean counterparts will do a full 13 hours of work or more, while the Irish on the same job will eventually find a way of doing it easier, so that it takes much less time.”

What the Celtic Tiger Irish would probably NOT do is what the South Korean people did when their country went bankrupt, and the IMF essentially took it over for a multi-billion-dollar loan. A call for those with any gold to back up to the country’s economy resulted in a massive handing in of jewellery and gold objets d’art, without any compensation.

And when giant Samsung group was unable to pay wages for a time, local banks waived interest and limits on employees’ credit cards so they could live until their money came through six months down the road.

So the country’s economy, and major industries, resolutely climbed back to the point where General Motors has decided on a major investment in the country as part of its recently-announced official buyout of Daewoo.

GM wouldn’t have bought in (after Ford declined to do so last year following a long investigation of the company) if they didn’t believe in the potential of Daewoo. Actually, the move wasn’t even remotely altruistic, as the deal gives them a couple of the most modern car manufacturing plants in the world for small money, and direct entry to a national market worth 1.5m units a year. It also gets them access to significantly important technology, not least of which is the Daewoo-developed transverse straight-six engine so far only available in the local market Magnus luxury car.

“One of the sweetest deals in motor industry history,” an ebullient Daewoo Ireland chairman Gerard O’Toole described it last night. Clearly happy after coming through a fairly horrendous 18 months for the Irish company.

Not that Daewoo Ireland weathered the parent company’s problems unscathed. After 30 months of excellent trading in Ireland that brought the brand from scratch to seriously interesting contention in the most competitive market in Europe, it has had to endure 18 months or so of serious depression here, in significant part due to uncertainty about the future of the company in global terms.

After all, would YOU want to buy a car brand which was very globally publicly on its way down the tubes? And the Irish company lost three dealers in the doldrum times out of its 25 resellers in this country.

But it is no longer an underdog uncertain of where its next meal is coming from. An investment in a Daewoo car now is underpinned by its being part of the biggest motor manufacturer in the world.

And underlining an ongoing development programme during its worst times, in the next eight months Daewoo will launch no less than five new models.

And the company that Tom McQueirns worked his way slowly through an immigration queue to see what was going to happen to it is on its way to being revitalised as a major world player in its own right. As fellow-country brand Hyundai has already managed. As also bankrupt Kia has equally done, turning a respectable profit last year.

Korea is not just a place for the World Cup 2002. It is also a revived centre for the real world of Motordom 2002 and beyond.