Focuses on Overseas
Nuke Power Market

KOPEC sees necessity to export its nuke technologies due to domestic market slowdown

The Korea Power Engineering Co. Inc. has its work cut out in the new year in support of the country's nuclear power industry and related companies in the process of making Korea, a country with independent nuclear power technology to not only localize the construction of nuke power plants, but also to export the technology.
The company feels that it needs a new growth momentum, now that the environment surrounding the nuke power industry has changed with the competition growing deeper and its growth reaching the limit as they stand.
To cope effectively with the situation, the company has been searching for new growth momentum, investing heavily to find next generation growth engines through a long-term vision. KOPEC has decided to focus on three areas to look for growth engines under a long-term vision.
First, the company will boost the quality and design of nuke power plants. Second, the company will concentrate on its technological capacities for spurring the operation of nuke power plants as the company's strategic business area and third and last,
it is a forceful effort to make advances overseas for nuke power plant design and technology markets.
The company will go all out to boost the quality of its products and enhancement of its competitive edge to grow to be a global enterprise by pursuing its strategies and targets in a positive manner.
KOPEC has the capacity to produce excellent designs for nuke power plants and has the experiences to back up its capacity. But in order for the company to be a global nuke power plant design firm, it has to continuously upgrade the quality of its design and boost its competitive edge to the extent that Korea's national competitive power is upgraded.
In order to achieve the objectives, the company should strengthen the quality of its design infrastructure to improve the checker system and the responsibility of middle-level managers to upgrade the quality of designing.
The company has also decided to elevate the quality of designing of nuke power plants by analyzing the propriety of the design work so far made to arrive at better economic designing plans and ways to find means to keep the quality level. The company will study various elements that go into designing nuke power plants such as the operation, maintenance, and the development of a system to trace the mistakes in designing to be able to come up with better quality design products.
Second, KOPEC will not only heighten its pure technology ability, but also operate the Integrated Plants Information Management System to replace all paper works with digital technology database to boost the effectiveness of discharge of company businesses and raise the level of design quality to the level satisfactory to its customers.
KOPEC has also been making efforts to find its market overseas, knowing that the growth of its domestic market is limited due to sluggish economic growth, and power demand and therefore determining that finding market overseas is a necessity, not an option.
The company, since its establishment some 30 years ago, gained the experience of nuke power plant designing jointly with the companies in advanced countries including the U.S. France, Canada, and Japan and learned their advantages and shortcomings. The company is in a position to cooperate with any country on nuke power designing and construction, taking advantage of its experiences. KOPEC has been working on the development of high-tech nuke power plants the most economic and safe designed solely with its own technologies.
Exports of nuke power plants are being conducted by the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., taking a central position as a company along cannot do the job in view of the independent nature of the nuke power plant construction technology and the system to power exports.
KHNP has already been making inroads into overseas nuke power plant market and conducted negotiations with such countries as Romania, Vietnam, Indonesia, and China. In some countries like Romania a nuke power plants either being built or are in the designing stages.
In August of 2003, 8 domestic companies engaged in works related to nuke power plant construction including KHNP, KOPEC, Korea Nuclear Fuel, Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction, Hyundai E&C, and Daewoo E&C, among others, have signed the Cooperation Agreement for the Promotion of Joint Advancement into Overseas Nuclear Power Plant Market.
Later in May last year, the Korea Electric Power Corp. Samsung Construction and Daelim Construction became participatory to the agreement.
KOPEC hopes that the new year would be the initial year for its growth as a world-class nuke technology firm by achieving its plan to upgrade its nuke power plant technologies. nw

(from left photo) KOPEC President Lim Seong-choon. KOPEC President Lim and his CANDU counterpart sign an MOU for cooperation in the area of nuke power plant designing technology.