Operates Headquarters to Prevent Possible Postal Terror Korea Post has reinforced security of mail to prevent possible terrorism in time for APEC Summit scheduled for Nov. 12-19 in Busan, Hwang Joong-yeon, president of Office of Postal Service, said. "For the nation's safe and successful hosting of the 2005 APEC Summit, Korea Post has been running a task force aimed at preventing terror by mail since last July," said Hwang. "Related to this, we additionally allocated miniature metal detectors for mail search and X-ray fluoroscopes to Seoul and Busan, where mail converges. Extra personnel were also assigned to customs houses and airports," he said. On Nov. 1, Hwang presided over a meeting in Busan on ways of ensuring safe mail for the APEC meeting amid the attendance of APEC security control chief, officials of relevant agencies and post office chiefs there. During the meeting, a demonstration session on the mail checking process from mail receipt to delivery as well as a mock search of suspicious mail was held. Also discussed was a systematic cooperative setup among relevant agencies in times of emergency. In an interview with Korea IT Times, Hwang said, "Korea Post will actively push ahead with offering the best postal and financial services to the Korean people based on sound profit structure." "To achieve this managerial vision, we have been implementing the 'uPOST 339' strategy," he said, adding that the first 3 means reform of customer service, reform of business model and reform of process, the middle 3 indicates welfare promotion of workers, labor-management cooperation, and result-based compensation, and the last 9 implies nine tasks to be carried out in the postal, financial and managerial sectors. On the nation's postal informatization, he said that Korea fell behind Germany and Japan in the postal automatization, but it excelled the two countries in terms of informatization. Korea Post built an integrated postal information system in July 2004, called the PostNet, which combines state-of-the-art IT technology and mail handling. Along with this, Korea Post established TestBed at its Euijeongbu Office in Gyeonggi Province to construct radio frequency identification (RFID)-based logistics system with an aim to commercialize it in 2007. For advancement of Korea's postal IT system into overseas markets, Korea Post also concluded a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Uzbekistan in April 2005 to support the latter's project to modernize postal business. In June 2005, Korea Post also sent a recommendation document to postal authorities in Norway, Denmark and Sweden for exports of the nation's PDA. Asked about the future direction of the express mail service (EMS) project, Hwang said, "The EMS project is Korea Post's core strategic business, which has enjoyed an annual average of over 15% growth thanks to its wide delivery network connecting 143 countries, inexpensive price, and speedy delivery." Noting that Korea Post expects its EMS sales to reach 149.2 billion won, he said, "We are planning to expand the sales to 180 billion won in 2007 and jack up the domestic market share from the present 33% to 40%." In line with this, Korea Post built an EMS integrated service network among the six countries - South Korea, Japan, the U.S., China, Australia and Hong Kong - on July 25 this year. "To enhance the status of Korea Post in the world, we will also play a leading role in activities of the Postal Operations Council (POC) and the Consultation Committee (CC) of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) by 2007," said Hwang. "In a nutshell, Korea Post will actively push for a blue ocean strategy to create handsome profits by building an advanced logistics distribution system, improving productivity and bolstering marketing activities centering on products with high value added based on the state-of-the-art IT technology," he added.