South Korea lands in Europe and in Italy, and does so with the support of Unicredit. The bank in Piazza Cordusio has in fact entered into a commercial agreement with Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK), the fifth largest financial institution in the Asian country, owned by the Korean government and specialized in lending to SMEs. The agreement provides that Unicredit, thanks to the widespread diffusion of its network in the Central-Eastern Europe (CEE) region, financially and operationally supports Korean small and medium-sized enterprises which are expanding in Central-Eastern Europe to follow the large corporations already present in that area, operating especially in the automotive, household appliances and consumer electronics sectors.
"The agreement with the Industrial Bank of Korea - underlines Gianni Franco Papa, head of Unicredit's Central-Eastern Europe Division - is further recognition of our role as a reference bank in that area of the EU. A region that continues to grow at a rate of almost two percentage points higher than that of Western Europe, becoming an important production and distribution platform also for many Asian companies”.
The small and medium-sized Korean production companies (with turnover between 0,5 and 5 million euros) that have settled in Central-Eastern Europe are in fact already over 300, of which about half in Russia and the rest in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic above all. About 50 Korean companies have production and commercial facilities in Italy. “With this agreement – concludes Papa – UniCredit confirms its ability to offer, directly or through strategic alliances, a global platform able to support companies in the internationalization processes. In the'CEE area, where we are present in 14 countries with 3.600 branches, there are already 11 thousand international companies that are our customers. Of these, over 3.600 are Italian”.
