The checkout at Commodore hotel in Gyeongju was 7:30am and we drove about an hour and half to Ulsan, which people say is a lot like Cleveland. It’s a huge port city most famously known for producing Hyundai cars.
Our first company visit was at Jinsan Marine Management. This company was very traditional and followed a lot of the professional meeting mannerisms that we studied in BusComm. There was a formal exchange of business cards, papers and snacks dealt, a hierarchy at the meeting table, a presenter to intriduce the speakers, etc. It was very professionally handled and I was surprised to see it this way. The company distributes shipping parts to ship builders like Hyundai. The tour of the warehouse was interesting too.
We had a decent fried rice lunch nearby and then drove to Hyundai Heavy Industries. I was expecting to learn a lot out of the presentation but the presentation just ended up being a quick tour through the memorial/visitors hall that they’ve built. We got to learn about the history and current state of the company but it would’ve been cooler to go more in depth. However, the shipyard tour was awesome because you don’t realize the scale it takes to build ships but it was very impressive. They had multiple projects going on and they were the first to do
The founder of Hyundai is actually from North Korea and ran for president. He was a very admirable and persistent man and shortened the time to repair automobiles, headed the Seoul Olympic Invitation Committee in 1988, and founded the Asan Foundation. The Hyundai ships can hold up to 13,000 to 19,000 containers. It takes about 16 months to build an average carrier and they’re all builded from the bottom up.
After Hyundai Heavy Industries, we checked into our hotel in Ulsan. The area was kind of weird, there were a lot of hotels that were sparkly with neon lights and lots of advertisements. I wasn’t really expecting that since its not a very tourist place and meant more for business people. But we got korean bbq for dinner, which i had tiny bits and pieces of.