POSTCO E&C has secured an unparalleled rank in Korea based on many years of experience and technical advancement covering the entire process of steel production from raw material processing to product manufacturing through building the latest steelworks in Pohang and Gwangyang. Regrettably, even though our technologies have been highly valued upon receiving orders from ARCO and other overseas projects, our dependence of basic plant technologies on the overseas supply channel has led us to a debilitating loss in the cutthroat price war against overseas markets such as the newly emerging Chinese market, which hit us hard, without leaving any room to fight back.

In March 2001, POSCO E&C has implemented an organizational restructuring that placed our technical development as its most important priority. At the same time, we have put in place a plan to develop plants in Korea with surface processing plants as the primary target, and have formed individual task force teams since May. And also through other enterprise-level assistance, we have tried to search for better ways to enhance the competitiveness in securing our orders.

Based on the key technologies secured through the existing comprehensive technology plan, POSCO's rationalization decisions, and on the case-by-case performance studies of overseas projects, we began developing the technologies of building plants in Korea involving SPM, tension leveler, and furnaces, key facilities in the CGL sector. Furthermore, the development system for technology has harnessed the resources of the business headquarters, the sales teams, the technology laboratories, RIST, and overseas specialists before their tasks were divided up. It was truly a technical development milestone for POSCO E&C.

Not only has the company pulled in a lot of resources and time to plunge in a quick but large-scale investment on the technical development and manpower, but the event itself has also helped boost the morale of the engineers', who had participated in the technical development. Furthermore, it made a considerable motivational impact on other areas.

In the end, we were able to secure a competitive position in terms of price in the foreign markets which in turn enabled us to aggressively enter both the Chinese and the South East Asian markets. On the global front, it also provided a turning point for our company to take more pride in the products we made following the recognition for your technology. When trade opened doors to our facilities production in Korea, it has led us to expand to areas of maximizing the size and quality of the facilities before gradually widening to include the entire sector, and has helped commercialize the acquired technologies as our industrial property rights.

For 5 years since 1998, POSCO, RIST, POSCO E&C, and Rotem have participated in the development of continuous casting technology, which was pursued as a national policy. 32.7 billion won was committed to this development. It was a prime example of a technical development that was strategically invested by the company for POSCO's total of 21 continuous casters, and the world's grand total of 1700 casters.

The company has successfully completed building the trial continuous caster that includes domestically produced casting molds, segments and other key equipments. However, due to POSCO's existing policies, its commercialization has been temporarily suspended, and regrettably it is still left as a long-term task the company needs to address.

Meanwhile, a taskforce was set up in 2001 for FINEX, the next-generation innovative steelwork facilities that had been pursued by POSCO as a strategic plan, and has since then set the technological development into full action. As a result, the 60-ton pilot plant (Jan 2001-May 2003) has been successfully built, demonstrating that the comprehensive engineering skills can be fully harnessed, and that a bright future can be built ahead based on the implementation of overseas business fundamentals.

Plus, POSCO E&C is striving to secure the basic design technologies to actively participate in the building of the demo plant (June 2004-June 2006). The pilot plant is to develop and commercialize the strip casting, an innovative steel technology that can drastically cut back on the use of energy and lower the pollutant emissions by eliminating the processing of heat and hot rolling when compared to traditional processing. It can also effectively reduce the delivery time and lower the production costs.