Participants at Seoul Economic Daily's Future Conference 2026, held on the 17th under the theme "How Korean Manufacturing Can Expand Into U.S. Territory," agreed that "with the era of free trade coming to an end, an entirely new form of industrial policy has become necessary." Experts said the "individual skills" of private companies alone are unlikely to produce an irreplaceable company like ASML of the Netherlands. In that respect, Korea can be seen as sitting in an ideal environment to achieve a second round of growth, since it already has a flagship player in every future industry event — from semiconductors to secondary batteries, shipbuilding, robotics, defense and biotechnology.
Kim Se-jin, head of the Trade and Industrial Policy Center at Shin & Kim, said in his keynote speech that day, "To use an Olympic analogy, Korea has a small delegation but can compete in every event and contend for medals in several of them — a country with full-stack manufacturing capability." He meant that even as the era of free trade draws to a close, Korea remains an industrial power with ample room for strategic cooperation with other countries.
"The world is now moving into an era of conditional free trade," Kim said. "Companies can no longer be bought and sold freely; the conditions on whom you can sell to have become far more demanding." In the past, for example, Chinese companies could aggressively acquire European firms and rapidly build up their technological capability, but European Union-level controls now make that difficult. For Korea, which has been under pressure from China's pursuit, this has the effect of buying time. "Even if you acquire or partner with a foreign company, you need a domestic industrial base to connect it to, and Korea can find many such connection points," Kim said. "In Europe there are many companies that hold technology but have not found a follow-on buyer or business partner."
Kim's proposed strategy is to use this approach to establish Korea as an irreplaceable supplier in the global manufacturing value chain. The idea is to design trade, diplomatic and economic security policies — and link financial policy to them — so that Korea can nurture several companies like ASML of the Netherlands, which is called a "super supplier" for its monopoly on advanced semiconductor lithography equipment, and thereby compress the accumulation process that advanced economies have built up over decades.
Kim believes that in advanced industries, the key to achieving this is effectively absorbing the experience and knowledge accumulated over long periods, known as "tacit knowledge." "When I asked someone in the semiconductor industry about concerns over China's pursuit, they told me it isn't something you can replicate by taking one or two people," he said. "The more advanced the industry, the more long-accumulated experience and knowledge resides in the organization rather than in individuals." He added, "When companies buy technology from abroad, they often secure only patents or licenses. They should not stop there, but consider how to compress and bring over that tacit knowledge."
He sees investment in the U.S. as another opportunity to compress the time and space of accumulation. "Rather than simply relocating production facilities to the space called America, let us use it as a space to build new experience," he said. "By securing management control of companies with advanced technology and staying in continuous contact with large customers while developing products, we can learn the next generation of technology."
Jang Young-jin, CEO of the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation (K-SURE), also stressed that Korea can turn the era of U.S.-China conflict into an opportunity. "Washington's containment of China is proceeding in two forms: technological containment to slow the pace of development, and market separation to block exports to the U.S.," Jang said. "The technological containment strategy does not look likely to work for long, but market separation will continue for some time because Europe is taking part as well." He added, "Even so, none of it matters if we have nothing to sell. Our main export products have not changed recently. We need to keep developing new things to export."
Jang's assessment is that industrial policy support is especially needed in materials, parts and equipment. "When I meet with companies, they tell me that even when large firms are doing well, the workload at second- and third-tier suppliers is shrinking," Jang said. "That is because the quality of Chinese products, the substitutes, has approached or surpassed that of Korean firms." He said, "In the past, when government-led policy localized materials, parts and equipment products, it was easy to find cases where the supply price quoted by foreign firms fell by half." He warned, "Turn that around, and the conclusion is that once domestic companies wither away, Chinese firms will not keep their prices as low as they are now."
