Software industry's importance as economic force The basic infrastructure of the nextgeneration growth industries such as BT and ET is the software industry. S/W exports were no more than $800 million among the whole $75 billion of IT industry exports last year. Its proportion is small but the S/W industry is a key industry, which is indispensable to heightening industrial competitiveness and further for the Korean economy to advance to a higher stage by enhancing value added in existing industries such as the IT industry, shipbuilding, manufacturing, and the construction industry in which Korea ranks top or very close to the top, globally. Korea IT Industry Promotion Agency (KIPA, www.software.or.kr) president and CEO Ko Hyun-jin says in an exclusive special interview on the occasion of the Seoul Digital Forum 2005 & World ICT Summit, 'By formulating KIPA Vision 2010 to promote Korea as a S/W power through achieving a localization rate of 40% by 2010, at the beginning of this year our Agency developed specific business goals'. The president said that this year would be one for fostering localization in the S/W field, explaining that the Agency is designing projects such as a GS (Good Software) certification system, and so forth, to this end. He believes that greater localization in strategic fields of S/W will increase gradually from next year, adding that the greatest topic of conversation at KIPA this year, is by far, 'localization'. As the most urgent task, which has to be tackled for the activation of the domestic S/W industry, Ko pointed out that the industry's value as a knowledge information industry is not understood since its business history is too short. 'This has been a great bottleneck for strengthening the competitiveness of Korea's S/W industry in the end', he explains. In that regard, he insists that the improvement of laws or systems for the sake of a proper assessment and understanding about the S/W industry should be attained as soon as possible, not the least to secure the industry's future profitability. He further said that nurturing the industry and market through development measure and appropriate stimulation is urgent. He underscored the industry's importance, saying that it is an invisible economic force, which beefs up the competitiveness of national society as a whole by enhancing not only the productivity of separate economic activities, but also the transparency of dealings and efficiency between such activities. Since KIPA was designated as the exclusive responsible institution to nurture the digital content industry by means of the online digital content industry development law in late 2002, the institution has been taking its place as the exclusive body to foster Korean S/W as well as the national digital content industry. As president Ko elaborated, with 'localization' as the main focus of the S/W industry, KIPA's goal is a S/W localization rate of 40% by 2010 and to this end is dedicated to improving the support system for the industry rather that helping specific companies. Also, Ko said that by devising strategic overseas cooperative market projects between governments, KIPA would support the furtherance of the Korean e-government system, SI, and associated solutions. Above all, next-generation projects for the purpose of launching new services such as DMB, home networks, WiBro, and telematics is a core activity for the Agency, he concludes. In addition, the fostering of the IT SoC (System on a Chip) industry also is one of the cardinal areas of endeavor that KIPA will pursue in the interests of securing core technology.