Q: First of all, please state the goal and significance of i-SEDEX 2007.
A: i-SEDEX 2007's goal is to facilitate overseas sales through purchase cooperation furtherance between supply and demand companies at home, unearthing excellent semiconductor devices, equipment and material manufacturers at home, and aggressive publicity activity of products. As an exhibition that represents the semiconductor and display industry at large, Korea's growth engine, i- SEDEX 2007 will serve as a momentum to display our semiconductor business circles' accumulated technology capacity to home and abroad. This means that domestic semiconductor industry's competitiveness has been improved to be on par with the world market in not only device manufacturers, but also in the equipment and material industry.
Q: What is the exhibition scale and its special feature this year
A: i-SEDEX 2007 is greeting its 9th year this year, and will come to show Korea's semiconductor and display industry's phase to home and abroad with 540 booths scale from 185 companies at home and abroad. Its major distinguishing marks are as follows: First, we invited oversea companies and buyers in large numbers by teaming up with KOTRA in consideration of an important turning point i-SEDEX starts its first step as an exhibition in the world.
Secondly to provide domestic semiconductor business circles with their inroads opportunities into the overseas market, we hold export business talks by inviting executives responsible for the purchase of overseas semiconductor business circles such as SMIC and Chartered Semiconductor.
On the other hand, there will be an award ceremony which supports semiconductor scholarship of 10 million won (US$10,700) each. With their spontaneous participation from semiconductor association executives and its member companies, the scholarship of a total of 300 million won (US$ 320,000) was forged in the hope of contributing to national industry development by supporting superior students of semiconductor-related science and engineering departments.
Fourthly as at the same time, the Semiconductor Technology Grand Prize, Job Fair and Technology Conference will be held together, we suppose that i-SEDEX 2007 will attract much interest.
Q: How is the latest present condition of Korea semiconductor industry
A: Korea semiconductor industry possesses 11.1% in world market with its production scale of US$29.1 billion. Following the United States and Japan, Korea posts the third rank in the world, but sweeps the first position in the world in the parts of DRAM and NAND Flash.
In terms of memory at large, Samsung Electronics and Hynix possess 28% and 13% respectively. As Samsung Electronics and Hynix possess 29% and 16% respectively in DRAM part too, Korea accounts for approximately 50% of production volume all over the world.
However, world market share of non memory semiconductor for Korea is no more than 2.6%. Thus, the technology gap is big in comparison with the United States at 56.0% or Japan at 24.2%.
As of 2006, our country's semiconductors shows the relative importance of the entire export 11.5%, the relative importance of GDP 4.9% and employment 100,000 persons level with export US$37.4 billion and its production amount of 41 trillion won (US$44 billion). Thanks to such growth, our country's semiconductor business has grown as the core industry that leads national economy after it has equipped with its production system in a lump in 1982.
Owing to world IT and semiconductor business stagnation in 2001, the production relative importance of the semiconductor industry declined to 9%. But due to world IT and semiconductor industry's favorable aspect, and memory price increase, the relative importance semiconductor export accounts for among our country total export amount in 2006, has increased slightly with 11.5% than the preceding year.
