With its 57 subsidiaries and assets of $60 billion, Hyundai is the largest of the Korean conglomerates. Hyundai Electronics Industries (HEI), established in 1983, represents a little over 10% of Hyundai’s business. Hyundai Electronics Industries has a strong position in semiconductors, having developed the first 256 Mbit Synchronous DRAM and first MPEG 2 decoder chip. Other business areas include displays (both liquid crystal and flat panel plasma displays), multimedia systems and telecommunications. Hyundai Electronics Industries has over 20,000 employees and in 1997 expected sales of over $5 billion, of which the telecommunications sector would represent about 10%. HEI has subsidiaries in the United States (10), the U.K. (2), Germany, China (including Hong Kong) (3), Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore. Countering its late entry into the field, HEI has a rigorous R&D program, plowing 10% of its sales into this activity.
Hyundai, the largest of the Korean conglomerates, has made a strategic decision to enter the communications satellite market and has an ambitious plan to become a full-scale satellite manufacturer by the year 2001. To this end it has formed a Satellite Business Division within Hyundai Electronics Industries and entered into a relationship with Loral, which has secured for HEI a role in the Globalstar Program. This includes the manufacture of some of the payload components and transfer of technology in the assembly, integration and test (AI&T) of satellites. Large, new facilities are under construction to support this activity (which were scheduled for completion by September 1998 and will be used to assemble and test the last two or three Globalstar satellites). Hyundai is also involved with the Koreasat program, having developed VSAT and paging systems for Koreasat-1 and 2, and captured the Ka-band transponder portion of the contract to construct Koreasat-3.
