How to adjust to 'the difference of viewpoint'

I still feel the point of view is different. I have felt between home media and the LA business Journal.

I focused on investor’s story. Everyone wants to know how to make money or how to succeed in investing in Korea. Especaily human success story is good stuff. So I started my lead like this;

Los Angeles resident Mr. Oh recently realized a whopping 30% return in little less than seven months. It’s a rate of return that’s hard to believe during these tough economic times. But what’s harder to believe is that there were about 15,000 others just like Mr. Oh.

But My editor, Charlie, asked me to focus on bank or company. I rewrote my lead like this

Shinhan Bank's four branches in Los Angeles have become a magnet for currency investing. That's because the bank started offering won accounts as the Korean currency began to fall against dollar last year amid the financial meltdown.

I think the investment story is also good subject matter. Perhaps my story is too narrow and limited. It is not investment story, but Korean's investment story.

I’m glad that I made a long story. It is the process that I adjust to American media style. Also I’m sure rewriting is helpful to understand the style.

I realized that I have to lose favor with the Korean way of thinking. I have tried this, but it is not easy.

In the last two weeks, there were a lot of annual shareholder meetings of the Korean American banks. Many board members were replaced because of poor performance.

The title of board members has the special meanings for Korean. In many cases, the wealth goes together the honor. But immigration society is something different. The honor is separated from money.

The most of board members already have a lot of money and succeed in their business. So they have a tendency to chase the honor. Losing the title is equal to lose the honor.

I am trying to write articles about non-financial companies. I have to change my beat when I return home because most of my experience is in the financial sector.

There is a strange trend in Korean media. Korean reporters must rotate their beat maybe once every other year. This trend starts to change, but it’s very slow and not enough. Editors prefer a generalist than a specialist until now.

I guess my next beat is department of industry or property. It's the department I didn't have experienced.

I contacted Kotra, Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, which handled an exhibition and investment consultation. There is a lot of information about companies, trying to expand business to U.S. or Korea.

To be honest, I have a bad impression about company groups like Samsung and Hyundai. They played dirty and killed small and medium enterprises in the process of growth.

Sometimes these big groups attack from low-price to merge promising small company or to acquire their technology instead of paying reasonable price. Moreover if the small companies developed niche market and succeed in their business, the groups violated. They should have leaned win-win.

A lot of people knew that the company groups accumulated capital a way to smuggle home appliances or the necessities of life into Korea.

But I acknowledged they changed in the right direction. When I saw foreigners used Samsung mobile phone and Hyundai cars ran fast on the freeway in U.S., as a Korean I’m very proud of that.

Sometimes, especially when I was abroad, I thought that exporting companies are true patriot. This is why I’ll try to cover industry field.

This is my original story.
by Myoung Hoon Suh

Los Angeles resident Mr. Oh recently realized a whopping 30% return in little less than seven months. It’s a rate of return that’s hard to believe during these tough economic times. But what’s harder to believe is that there were about 15,000 others just like Mr. Oh.

What Mr. Oh and thousands of others just like him have in common is that they all converted their holdings of US dollars into the Korean won in October not long after the fall and demise Lehman Bros. Most of them were overseas Koreans, but includes a wealthy American who invested more than U$2 million.

There may be those who deride them for being no more than simple currency speculators, but a closer look reveals two reasons why they cannot be brushed off so easily.

The investment story starts back in September of last year. Before then, during the first quarter of 2008, the KR\/U$ exchange rate was less than \950 per dollar. But the rate inched up bit by bit and breached the \1,000 mark in Q2 and had reached \1,100 by September.

Mr. Kim Tae-han, vice president of Shinhan Bank America, said, “It is a parity that 100,000 dollars is 100 million won almost a given the last 5-6 years,” he said. “But investment inquiries started to flood in once it went to \1,100.”

But the action got off to a real start come October after the exchange rate shot up to \1,300 with the failure of Lehman Bros. The average investment was around U$100,000-U$200,000 when the exchange rate was in the \1,200 range, but rose to an average of U$300,000-U$500,000 over \1,300.

Mr. Kim said “We started offering Korean won accounts in October,” and that “the phones were ringing off the hook with investor interest.”

For example, it was an account that deposited the equivalent of U$100,000 in Korean won at the time of opening.

New Korean won accounts opened in October came to U$70.5 million, then U$80.69 million the next month before tapering to U$59 million in December.

According to the Bank of Korea, a total of U$7.9 billion was remitted from overseas last year. Such flows continued this year when U$2.1 billion was remitted to the end of last March.

An investor who came in December when the exchange rate was \1,500 per U$1 he would have realized a tidy 20% as of the current rate of \1,250. For example, if U$100,000 was invested at \1,500, a total of \150 million would have been deposited in the Korean won bank account. But when the amount is converted back to US dollars at current rates, a total of U$120,000 would be deposited in a US dollar bank account.

The profit margin would have been a lot higher had the investment been in either Korea’s stock market or Korean real estate than simply in a deposit account.

The bellwether Korea Composite Stock Price Index, or KOSPI for short, has surged more than 25% to over 1,400 from 1,124.47 at the end of last year. The combined haul would top 40%, however, if the exchange rate differential were to be factored in.

Investors in real estate are also realizing substantial gains. Mr. Ahn Myung-Soo, the real estate team leader at Woori Bank PB, said, “Overseas Koreans’ currency conversion was heaviest at \1,400 per U$1,” and “though there weren’t many who converted at the peak, the 10-15% appreciation of their real estate investments have translated into an average return of about 30%.”

More interesting is the fact that such investing hasn’t been confined solely within the American Korean communities. Mr. Ahn said, “I’ve seen a lot of overseas Koreans from Brazil and Argentina who flew in just to invest,” and that “Most bought properties in Korea’s most vibrant and most expensive real estate district, which is Gangnam, it’s like Beverly Hills, in Seoul.”

For Korean banks, overseas Koreans’ remittances were like rain to ward off a drought. At the time, all the banks were frantic trying to secure dollars in a liquidity crisis. And under such circumstances overseas Koreans’ remittances were welcomed to no end.

More than having sat on one’s laurels waiting for the global financial crisis to happen, what was it other than holding enough in cash to have convinced all the investors to invest with such confidence? First and foremost would be the experiences wrought from the foreign currency crisis of 10 years past.

In 1997, Korea sought relief financing from the IMF as a result of the foreign currency crisis. The won-dollar exchange rates had gone from about \900 to about \2,000 per US dollar within a span of only a few months. But Korea was about to weather the foreign currency crisis in about 3 years.

Mr. Oh said, “My confidence in Korea cemented after going through the foreign currency crisis.” He added, “Like the last time, the Korean economy will likely be affected for a while by this financial crisis, but I decided to invest because the country will eventually do more than simply recover.”

To be sure, Mr. Oh had more practical reasons for deciding to invest. He said, “Korean banks’ interest rates were in the 6% range whereas American banks’ deposit rate were no more than in the 4% range,” and “I was concerned about the value of the dollar falling with so much already having been supplied to fight the financial crisis.”

Korean-American investments might just look a lot like investor Warren Buffet’s value investing. After all, they believed in Korean economy’s value and decided to invest with far-sighted investment horizons.

Such investment trends have brought about two big changes. First is that Shinhan Bank has become a household name among overseas Koreans. Mr. Lee Jung-Joo, vice president of Shinhan Bank America, said, “It’s been less than ten years since Shinhan Bank become one of the Big Three in Korea,” and “This was an opportunity for us to have significantly raised our profile among the first-generation of Korean-Americans.”

In fact, Shinhan Bank’s Korean won deposit accounts grew by more than 6,000 accounts after October last year.

This has had an impact even in policymaking. Having seen the brunt of a foreign-currency shortage and the long Korean-American queue for remittances, the Korean government approved a money market fund exclusively tailored to overseas Koreans and planning to lower foreign capital gains tax from the current 20% to 5%.