Park Namgyu - Professor
Corporations and markets are inseparable. When a market grows bigger or has the potential to do so, corporations will be attracted to the market. In the viewpoint of corporations, this is a natural and inevitable response.
A corporation’s goal is determined by the value it seeks. Semiconductors manufacturers and pharmaceuticals makers have different goals. Corporations always seek to transform themselves for better values, however. Refusing to settle for current technologies and products, they strive to attain new and more value-added technologies. Underneath their effort for transformation lie demands from consumers and the society.
If the end-users of a product are general consumers, corporations will have to seek to come up with new items in response to the ever-changing demands of consumers. They will try to lead the market and watch how consumers react. Corporations’ response to the society’s demands may be a bit different. Unlike consumer demands, which take on different forms rapidly, social demands can be felt only when social consensus is reached after a long discourse and thus it takes time to sense the changes.
For example, the issue of energy, which forms the basis of industries and people’s lives, has close ties with social demands. There have long been concerns about fossil fuel reserves and environmental pollution, but the concerns were not heart-felt. The real awakening about the warnings of excessive CO2 emissions came only after many lives were lost due to the ever-intensifying and more damaging hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other disasters. It needed a long time for people to realize understand the global warming effect and natural calamities resulting from the use of fossil fuels. Social demands for green energy as an alternative came to the fore.
Now many people around the world realize the importance of green energy. Green energy is energy generation technology that utilizes environment-friendly energy sources such as solar energy and wind. The growth of the solar cell market is reflecting the social demands for zero CO2 emissions.
Given its growth, it is only natural that corporations become interested in the market. No corporations invest in a market with their eyes blinded. They will decide on their investment after careful analyses of past market growth, present market conditions, future potential, and such.
The solar cell market has grown steadily for the past ten years, and boasted as much as 100% year-on-year growth in 2010. Korean corporations perhaps saw the future of the solar cell energy market in the changes of the past and the present. The firm demands of the society regarding green energy and the bright future of the solar energy market moved conglomerates.
Currently, China and Japan dominate the solar cell market. Had Korean conglomerates determined they do not have a chance of winning part of the solar cell market currently divided among Europe, Japan, and China, they would have withdrawn their investment in the market. The fact that many conglomerates are partaking in the business testifies that they feel confident.
Korea was not even in the global top-ten list in the solar energy market only two or three years ago. Now it is the eighth-ranked solar cell maker country, which was possible after conglomerates’ participation in the business. We can anticipateKorea will become one of the global three in the solar cell market in the near future.
Source: GreenDaily
