KOREAN VIEW: Live
Life Like a Millionaire
‘Korea’s Wealthy – How
100 Self-made Rich Koreans Made Money’
By Kim Min-hee, Korea
Most people imagine he typical rich Korean
man became successful by being born into a wealthy family, or holding such jobs as a
lawyer or doctor, or landed windfalls when he won a lottery, or the price of his real
estate unexpectedly shot up.
There’s also a tendency to stereotype
the rich as spendthrift, living in posh apartments and buying prohibitively expensive
items as a hobby.
While this may be true in many eases for
wealthy Koreans, it’s easy to overlook the existence of a whole different breed of
rich people in Korea – those who worked very hard to become rich, often starting off
as salaried workers, and continue to work as hard afterwards to stay rich.
This provide true for the 143 rich people
Han Sang-bok, a Web newspaper reporter, surveyed. The summary of those interviews,
“Korea’s Wealthy – How 100 Self-made Rich Koreans Made Money,” is
currently a bestseller.
The book offers many fresh insights on
Korea’s affluent, as well as some old wisdom.
Most comforting to the readers is probably
the fact that just about everyone Han talked to started off as salaried employees, and
began their journey to wealthy by saving in the bank.
The fact that these people, whose assets
are valued between 2 billion won and 100 billion won, had similar beginnings as any of us,
in fact, is a recurrent theme throughout the book. But Han also chronicles how they got
ahead along the way by making wise investments, parti9culary in real estate, and sticking
to certain rules.
All but one of the 100 subjects – Han
trimmed the 143 down to 100 patterns – started off as salaried employees. Even the
few doctors and lawyers among them also began their careers as part of a general hospital
or a law firm. None of them owned a company or a store at the start.
The interviewees – most of whom Han
got to know through people at banks, stocks and insurance companies – spoke highly of
the benefits of working for an organization, where a person inevitably picks up people
skills and learns to survive competition. Seventy-one hoped that their children would
follow suit.
Han also discovered that contrary to what
most people think such job titles as lawyers and doctors don’t guarantee wealth. He
quoted one of the interviewees, a lawyer, saying that an attorney’s fee is only
“enough to buy a pack of gum.”
“There’s not much left after you
pay the rent and pay your employees. There’s more cause for money going out than
money coming in. someone who says you can be rich by becoming a lawyer just doesn’t
know reality. Lawyers also have to make investments after saving their income,” the
lawyer said.
The interviewed also shared the view that
graduation from a prestigious university did not mean a person would make a lot of money.
“It takes a different head,” they said.
One of the interviewees, who runs his own
business and graduated from a third-class university, explained graduates of prestigious
universities have a tendency to pursue chair-bound positions like those in planning a
finances. “ The problem is that they don’t have much opportunity to make
money,” he said.
Han draws a conclusion that, as some would
guess correctly, the surest way to become rich in Korea is to accumulate real estate. Many
of the rich people Han interviewed still spend much of their time and energy looking for
good deals.
“In a country that has so little
territory as ours, there is no better source of investment as real estate,” one of
the interviewees summed up the situation in Korea.
Eighty-eight of the 100 cited rent fees as
their biggest source of income. Followed by profits from their businesses such as
companies, stores and offices. Stocks and bonds were their third biggest source of income.
“The most common rich people around us
are the owners of ‘set-bang’ (room for rent). The owners of conglomerates we see
in the newspaper are not the only rich people. It is very unlikely for someone to succeed
by starting a company,” Han wrote.
Han said that many people he interviewed
had made a habit of seeking every nook and corner for real estate deals, especially in
their neighborhoods and cities.
As for the habits of rich people, they were
alike in getting up early and going to bed early. Sixty-seven of the 100 said they wake up
between 5 a.m. and 6a.m., 21 around 4a.m., and eighty between 6a.m. and 7a.m.
As for their spending habits, Han
summarized them into three characteristics: Never buy something that is not necessary and
get cheaper deals on things you need, but try to maintain class. They are also careful to
avoid television shopping while using Internet banking to save transaction fees.
In fact, 68 percent of them were considered
misers by their family members.
For those who want to become rich, the
people Han interviewed recommend that you start off with by saving in the bank, which runs
little risk. When the money in the bank has grown to a sizable sum, it is time to take
some risk, but not too much. They recommend you take up products like stocks until the
last moment when there’s plenty of money to spare.
Many of them recommended readers not to go
into debt in order to make money. But interestingly, all of them had intentionally
borrowed money to make profit.
Text courtesy: Korea Now, June 28,
2003. Embassy of Korea in Kathmandu.
From
Basketweaving to Web Design
Egypt Looks to Low and High Tech for Jobs
More than 600,000 people a year seek
work in tight market
By Joseph Vess, Fayoum, Egypt
In the back room of a small house down a
crowded dirt street, crammed between apartment buildings and other small brick houses,
Gamalat Goma’a Maqboul twists and braids strands of the skin of palm trees between
her hands, gripping the end between two toes. She sells the strands to Umm Said, a few
streets away, who uses a small loom to weave them into sturdy baskets that farmers use to
transport fertilizer and crops on the backs of donkeys.
Mrs. Maqboul is now able to buy the palm
skins in bulk because of the 500 Egyptian pound-loan (about US$90) from Fayoum’s
Family and Community Development Association, a micro-finance institution funded by
UNDP’s Micro Start Programme and the Social Fund for Development. She is now able to
skip the unreliable middlemen of her trade, and as a result, has extra cash-enough to send
her younger children to school and help her older daughters get married. Now, she is
hoping to build extra rooms in her house so her son can marry.
Mrs. Said, too, now sells her products
directly to the farmers. She has also benefited from a micro-credit loan, and her
operation helps keep a half-dozen women like Mrs. Maqboul in business.
An already stained labour market
keeps growing
Every year, Egypt’s population grows
by some 1.1 million people, and about 600,000 new entrants flood the job market. As a
result, creating new job opportunities and reducing poverty are key government priorities.
Nationally unemployment hovers above the 10 percent mark, while an estimated 40 percent or
more earn a living working in micro or small-scale enterprises in the informal sector.
Indeed small enterprises are seen as one solution to the glut of new labour. Small and
micro enterprises provide 77 percent of jobs in the non-agricultural private sector and
the government expects informal sector enterprises to employ half of the new entrants to
the labour force over the next 20 years.
More than 6,000 new jobs in Fayoum
Fayoum is Egypt’s largest oasis, and
contains acres of green fields, palm trees and lakes that make it stand out from the
Sahara desert like a lone star on a dark night. But the economy is largely agrarian, and
many farmers continue to till their fields the way their families have for generations.
In less than three years of operation,
Micro-Start Egypt has generated a total of 6,437 jobs in the governorate and has lent
millions of Egyptian pounds to Fayoum’s working poor, many of whom are no longer
quite so poor.
MicroStart Egypt’s loan capital is
provided by the Social Fund for Development, which also decides which local
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to fund. UNDP, with a focus on strengthening NGOs,
provides financial training for MicroStart administrators and provides technical
assistance about micro-credit implementation and best practices in other developing
economies.
The loan recipients are primarily-about 62
percent-economically-active poor women. They are usually enthusiastic about expanding
their businesses, whether it is farming, weaving baskets or selling candy, snacks and
cigarettes from a corner kiosk. They are between 21-60 years of age, and most have had
incomes of less than $71 per month.
The loans carry a 16 percent interest rate,
usually over 12 months, a rate that is high enough to make sure that repayment is taken
seriously and that also allows local NGOs to reinvest and e3xpand their programmes. The
interest rate is a little higher than the commercial banks to guarantee the sustainability
of the operation and to cover risk as well as the running cost in the absence of the
collateral. The loans, which range in size from no more than $215 for the first loan to a
maximum of $445 for the second, have a 99 percent repayment rate. As a result, the NGOs
have been able to sustain their programme by themselves.
“The vision of micro Start is to
motivate the people and make productive villages,” explains Ahmed Abdel Akher, the
Social Fund for Development’s Fayoum regional office manager. “It will also
decrease poverty and unemployment in Fayoum, but we need to expand into other.
Districts.” The Fund hopes to enlist at least 10 more microfinance institutions into
MicroStart in Fayoum over the next five years, and later on perhaps even expand further in
Egypt.
Internet café’s and high-tech
jobs
But Egypt’s job creation plans go well
beyond small traditional enterprises, and the government has made a major push to promote
Internet access and the development of computer skills to generate employment
opportunities.
Only an estimated 2.5 million of 70 million
Egyptians have regular Internet access, and although that number is growing, a home or
office computer is beyond the means of most of those Egyptians. Many professionals and
students rely on low-cost public centres to seek access to the outside world.
These technology centres have helped spawn
new businesses. In Zagazig, the capital of Sharkeyya Governorate, which lies north of
Fayoum and Cairo in the heart of the Nile Delta, the establishment of a Technology Access
Community Centre has been accompanied by the opening of at least 20 independent Internet
café’s. Zagazig became wired in 1999 due to the efforts of UNDP, Egypt’s
Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and local investors.
Esam Rizk,the Centre’s director,
estimates that about 340 jobs were created indirectly last year, due largely to training
courses in subjects like Html, Photoshop and general computer and internet use. Mr. Rizk
also noted that the Centre allows people in all walks of life, especially those who rely
on cutting-edge research such as medicine and agriculture, to do their jobs better and
more efficiently.
The true beneficiaries of Egypt’s push
to develop information technology will be the country’s youth. At present, 80 percent
of the Centre’s patrons are under the age of 30, and 40 percent are under 20.
Salwa Ali, a former employee of the Centre
who designed an online course in computer skills that is still used, opened her own
Internet café three years ago. Women make up nearly 40 percent of the centre’s
patrons, patrons, providing many educational opportunities they might not otherwise have
in a country where only a third of the women are literate.
Tech skill attract employers’
attention
These added skills attract the attention of
employers in Cairo and Alexandria who have framed work out to people in Zagazing, or, in
some cases, have even opened offices in the city, where labour costs are cheaper. The
Zagazig tech centre maintains an online database of jobs for prospective employers and for
job seekers. These postings include offers from other Arab countries, which often look to
Egypt for qualified Web developers.
The success of the Centres has laid the
foundation for a new $11 million programme, which will extend IT projects across the
country over the next two years. Supported by UNDP, Egypt’s Ministry of
Communications and Infuriation Technology and an Italian debt-swap agreement, the
programme has the potential to create many jobs.
Text courtesy: Choices, June 2003.
UNDP, Nepal Office. |
