Can North Korea Be Safe for Business.doc

1、Comment k1: 平壤Comment k2: 主持Comment k3: 实际的Comment k4: 制裁Comment k5: 金正日Can North Korea Be Safe for Business?Few investors can boast the one-of-a-kind global pedigree of Felix Abt. Since 2002, the Swiss businessman has found his calling as a point man for Western investments in - of all places - Nor

2、th Korea, where he helped found the Pyongyang Business School in 2004. He also presided over the European Business Association in Pyongyang, a group in the capital that acts as a de facto chamber of commerce. A few years ago, that position led him to help set up the first “European Booth” featuring

3、around 20 European companies each year at the Pyongyang Spring International Trade Fair, an annual gathering of 270 foreign and North Korean companies currently underway in the hermit kingdom until Thursday.Yet Abt, 55, who lives in Vietnam and therefore wont be attending the trade fair this year, l

4、aments the giant cloud hanging over the country: in recent years, political turmoil on the peninsula has raised the stakes even further for doing business in North Korea - even for the countrys main patron, China. Though investors have always faced the prospect of sanctions, he says, the situation h

5、as worsened after the United States ratcheted up sanctions on the government in 2006 on allegations that it was counterfeiting U.S. dollars. And in 2006 and 2009 the Kim Jong-il regime tested two small nuclear bombs, prompting heavier sanctions from the United Nations in 2006. Recently, tensions wit

6、h Seoul have spiked over the March sinking of a South Korean corvette in waters near the North.Those measures hit home for Abt. While he was running a pharmaceutical company in Pyongyang called Pyongsu in the mid-2000s, he learned that the U.N. Security Council had imposed sanctions on certain chemi

7、cals - a move that could have forced him to completely stop manufacturing medicine. Thankfully, he adds, he had already secured a large stock of the substance beforehand. “Whatever business you are involved in,” he says, “some day you may find out that some product or even a tiny but unavoidable com

8、ponent is banned by a U.S. or U.N. sanctions because it can, for example, also be used for military purposes.”Those dilemmas havent stopped Abt. In 2007, he co-founded an information technology firm in Pyongyang called Nosotek, whose 50 or so employees design software applications for the iPhone and

9、 Facebook. The venture has already seen its share of success: one of its iPhone games ranked first in popularity for a short while on Apples Top 10 list for Germany - though he cant name the software out of concern for protecting his contractors from bad publicity.For some companies, the stigma of a

10、 “Made in North Korea” label matters less than the competitive edge gained from having low overhead costs and a diligent workforce whose wages remain less than Comment k6: 大量炮制Comment k7: 自主Comment k8: 金日成outsourcing powerhouses like China, Vietnam and India. In the past, North Korea has attracted t

11、he interest of multinational corporations looking for cheap labor in fields as diverse as electrical machinery and cartoon animation. Yet few multinationals show their faces at this months fair, a decline from the early 2000s when Abt says they were appearing regularly to look for opportunities in e

12、lectricity, infrastructure, transportation and mining. Not all foreign ventures in the North are driven by profit margins alone. The 2005 animated Korean movie Empress Cheung, a popular fantasy film drawn jointly by South and North Korean animators, brought attention to the animation industry in Nor

13、th Korea. Nelson Shin, head of the Seoul-based animation studio that started the project, claims he worked with North Korea for a greater cause than cheap labor. “It wasnt so much because of cost efficiency as because of cultural exchange between the two Koreas,” he says.For a country so poor, North

14、 Korea has churned out a remarkable number of talented engineers and scientists who fuel some of these small sectors (along with its controversial nuclear weapons program). In the 1960s and 1970s, the government pushed the country to become self-sufficient through development projects, a part of its

15、 ideology of “Juche” that promotes absolute autonomy from foreign powers. The communist regime of Kim Il-sung prided itself on its universities and Comment k9: 非法交易麻醉剂Comment k10: 洗钱public housing system, in particular. “It was an advance from pre-World War II days,” says Helen-Louise Hunter, a form

16、er CIA analyst now in Washington, D.C., who researched North Korea during those decades. “Kim Il-sung was genuinely interested in improving his peoples standard of living, and was off to a good start in a couple of areas compared to South Korea in those early days.”Yet North Korea fell behind after

17、the Souths own military dictators put their country into industrial overdrive throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Then the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, depriving North Korea of valuable aid. Then came a famine in the mid-1990s that delivered the final blow, leaving up to 3 million people dead and cri

18、ppling the capacities of the already isolated state.Today, the pariah regime of Kim Jong-il is allegedly known to raise money through illicit activities like trafficking narcotics and money laundering. But its not known how much those activities figure into the countrys GDP of $28.2 billion in 2009

19、and its $2 billion worth of exports in 2008, the most recent year data is available. “Not that much income comes from illegitimate operations if you mean drugs and counterfeited dollars,” says Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in Seoul. “More come from arms sales, though, but

20、 I would not describe this as an illegitimate trade.”Comment k11: 垄断Comment k12: 变革促进者Abt shakes off the image of Pyongyang being the center of a mafia state. He sees himself and other foreign investors as the potential movers and changers of Kims hermit regime. “Cornering a country is ethically more questionable than engagement,” he says. “Foreigners engaging with North Koreans are change agents. The North Koreans are confronted with new ideas which they will observe and test, reject or adopt.”