A scene from Gangnam district (Image courtesy of Wikimiedia Commons)
SEOUL, Jun. 23 (Korea Bizwire) — A new survey has revealed that that 7 out of 10 people working for small and medium sized startup companies thought that competition practices among Korean businesses were unfair.
This was according to a study commissioned by the Small and Medium Business Administration that was conducted on May 23 and 24, in which 71.8 percent of respondents answered that corporations were “unfair” when it came to corporate competition, which was twice the number of those who stated competition was “fair” (28.2 percent).
Respondents said the unfairness was due to conventional practices (32.9 percent), a concentration of resources on large enterprises (22.8 percent) and lax regulations (12 percent).
More than half of the respondents (50.6 percent) said that a key way to encourage startups to grow came from government policies nurturing the growth of the sector. This was followed by securing technology (19.3 percent), creating a social infrastructure (16.6 percent) and innovation in regulations (9.2 percent).
Many entrepreneurs complained that entire industries were focused on the growth of large conglomerates, which made it very difficult for smaller and newer firms to penetrate the market.
One entrepreneur in the cosmetics industry said that when a product starts selling well, large corporations jump into the market and start to sell similar products. “Because the large companies started to dominate the market, I had no choice but to export the products overseas,” said the entrepreneur.
H. S. Seo (hsseo@koreabizwire.com)
