Global tech giants have been courting local startups by investing in and supporting them recently, according to market watchers.
Jack Ma, the founder and Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group, China’s largest e-commerce company, told local reporters in Seoul on Tuesday, “(We are) very interested in Korean startups. We have received three letter of intents for the two days while in Korea. We are going to make investment if we can find right firms.”
On the same day, IBM also announced that it would back local startups with its softlayer services free of charge in a bid to help them jump into the global market. They plan to select startups to offer the services amounting to $120,000 for the next year.
American multinational technology and consulting corporation, Cisco signed a partnership with local startup N3N by investing 5 billion won directly early this month. Qualcomm partnered with local tech Hidea Solutions to jointly develop LTE-based IoT solution last year. The firm set up Qualcomm Ventures in 2010 and has invested in eight firms for the last four years.
The world’s largest search engine Google is also keeping a keen eye on local startups. The Internet giant opened its Campus Seoul to support startups and entrepreneurs for the first time in the Asian region. Korea was the third country behind the U.K. and Israel.
“Google regards developers in South Korea high and we have willingness to invest more in the nation,” said an official from Google Korea.
Other global firms such as Oracle and Intel are also ramping up their efforts to foster startups in South Korea.
The reasons behind the global tech firms’ keen attention on local startups are Korea’s outstanding information technology infrastructure along with advanced technologies and global competitiveness of local tech startups.
“The latest deals between global firms and local startups reflect great attention poured into Korea’s venture ecosystem. We are planning to support more such deals to help local startups to jump into overseas,” said an official from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning.
By Yeon Choul-woong
