Through our independently secured advanced technologies such as plant technology and our strategic alliances with the globally advanced foreign E&C corporations, the technical research laboratory has proactively promoted the advancement and globalization of Korea's domestic technology. While avoiding simple construction works that yield minimal profit, the institute targeted high-profit-generating, performance-based businesses ranging from planning to construction management.

POSCO E&C has established the gaining of onsite experiences as a requirement for the research workforce. Furthermore, it has not only promoted the exchanges of human resources between the laboratory and the business departments, but has also implemented the aggressive searches and recruitment of the best of the best. Both in name and in practice, it has promptly laid the foundation for growing into the best engineering and consulting laboratory in the nation.

Since our inception, as a result of our hard work to enter the ranks of leading E&C powerhouses like Bechtel, POSCO E&C has secured about 60 outstanding researchers to cover areas ranging from the steel plants, the basic technology sector, and the construction sector, such as civil engineering and construction. In addition, POSCO E&C has developed a plan to send teams to visit the top 5 research laboratories of the Japanese construction companies including Kajima, and to secure research and development supplies that approximate the size of the lab supplies these companies own. Moreover, in order to build a large-scale technology research institute, we have acquired approximately 47,000 pyeong (or, 155,100 square meters) of land near Seoul in Giheung-Eup, Gyeonggi Province.

POSCO E&C has set the goals to effectively develop new technologies that will enable POSCO E&C to not just secure the engineering technologies in the field of the plant sector, such as steel, but also to enhance the competitiveness of the company's civil engineering and construction sectors. With this goal in mind, POSCO E&C has divided the organizational structure of the technical research laboratory into engineering and construction divisions in Feb 21, 1995.

As a result of this change, the technical research laboratory, which had been under the President's direct control, was transferred to the engineering division. Two additional title changes took place, from engineering research team and construction research team to plant research team and to civil engineering and construction research team, respectively. Civil engineering and construction research team has been placed under the civil engineering and construction research laboratory, and became the first technical research laboratory to become part of the construction division.

After two years of building new construction project to build the technology research laboratory at our Giheung site which began in 1996, we have successfully completed the first phase construction of the research building unit. And, in the second phase, after building the ancillary buildings including the nation's largest civil engineering testing unit and the quality testing unit, we have completed the construction of the building complex in Nov 1999. Today, the technical research laboratory stands tall surrounded by the beautiful scenery around the facility.