Focusing on New Technologies, Strong Marketing Drive

Doosan Group revs up its global business network to expand its nuclear power generation and desalination equipment sales

Chairman Park Yong-hyun of Doosan Group feels that the group has to expand its overseas operations, markets for its heavy equipment in particular, to ensure its sustainable growth in 2010.
The chairman, therefore, will steer the group to focus on R&D activities in search of new technologies and an overseas marketing drive next year to get all of its affiliates both at home and abroad moving.
Park, an M.D. by profession, who took over as chairman of the group early this year, said investments in core technologies, boosting product quality and competitiveness and a global marketing rush are keys to the group’s successful operation next year in order to pave the way for the group to sustain its growth momentum despite all the adversities from the global economic slump.
The group recently held a strategy meeting in Yentai, Shandong Province, where Doosan Infracore has a plant, to map out its global strategies for next year, which are generally patterned after what the chairman said.
The key focus at the meeting was the global market, as the group has to strengthen its global operations to explore markets for its products to ensure its survival amidst the intense global competition.
What Park has been saying is that the group must sustain its growth for another century as the inheritor of the Park Seung-jik Store, the mother of the group set up and operated by the late Park Seung-jik, the patriarch of the Park family in Seoul. The group’s beginning goes back 113 years.
Park also feels that investments should be made in the areas of manpower training and the development of technologies and systems to the extent that the group would be a global contender because they are three critical areas for a business group.
The most vital sector for the group’s operations is the power generation equipment sector and Doosan plans to expand its market in such regions as Southeast Asia, the Middle East and China, with the biggest push on selling nuclear power generation equipment, such as reactor vessels and steam generators produced with its own technologies, which it already ships to nuclear power plants in the U.S. and China, in addition to providing them to domestic nuclear power plants.
Last year, Doosan officials said the company received orders for nuclear reactor vessels and steam generators for three new nuclear power plants in the United States, which resumed building nuclear power plants after 30 years.
Doosan Heavy acquired key technologies for power plants including those for boilers, turbines and power generation by taking over Skoda Power Co. in the Czech Republic last year at the cost of 450 million euro.
The company also plans to continue to expand in the desalination sector. The company also has its eyes on supplying non-nuclear power plant equipment in foreign countries ― India and Southeast Asian countries in particular, as they are on the verge of building a number of mega-conventional thermal power plants soon.
The company built a heavy equipment plant in Dung Quat, Vietnam, to produce boilers, desalination equipment and transport equipment aimed at the Southeast Asian market. The large plant will be run by local staff and workers under a strategy to expand Doosan Vina, as the new plant is called, to the level of the company’s main plant in Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province, with annual sales of $3.5 billion from the plant by 2020.
Doosan Group is expected to expand its investments in such new business areas as recycled energy, carbon capture and storage, clean coal, wind power and fuel batteries. Doosan Heavy would also focus on the development of its new affiliate Doosan Babcock, a firm specializing in power generation equipment design and engineering so that the newly acquired company would be able to take a larger share of the power generation equipment market around the world, especially securing power plant projects. nw

Chairman Park Yong-hyun of Doosan Group is on a tour of the Doosan Babcock Co. in Britain on a leg of his tour of the group’s overseas operations early this year.