South Korea, renowned for making high-tech consumer devices, cars and ships, now has its sights on exporting fighter jets amid a projected sharp increase in demand for military weapons in Asia over the next decade.
Korea Aerospace Industries Ltd (KAI) on Tuesday rolled out the nation’s first home-built light fighter — the FA-50 — from its assembly plant in the southern city of Sacheon.
KAI officials say that they aim to sell about 1,000 FA-50s and T-50s overseas over the next three decades, and are eyeing markets in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and the Americas.
Photo: Reuters
“Countries in Southeast Asia and South America are finding FA-50s enormously attractive,” Park Jeong-soo, a senior official from KAI’s external affairs department, told reporters.
Global defense budgets are forecast to increase by 9.3 percent to US$1.65 trillion by 2021, according to analysts IHS Janes.
Defense budgets in the Asia-Pacific region are forecast to outstrip that in North America by 2021, up 35 percent from this year’s levels to US$501 billion, it added in its Balance of Trade report in June.
Photo: Reuters
That will pit South Korea’s fighters against US, European, Chinese and Russian companies in an increasingly crowded — yet still lucrative — market.
BUDGET CONSTRAINTS
South Korea is also planning to develop a much larger KF-X fighter with the help of US defense contractors, although that has been delayed by budgetary constraints.
Photo: Reuters
The first FA-50 is part of an order for 20 fighters by South Korea’s air force, which will use them to replace its aging Northrop F-5 fighters.
Negotiations are ongoing with the Philippines, with a local online news outlet reporting that a US$460 million deal with Manila for 12 FA-50s could be completed this month.
Officials at the Sacheon headquarters of KAI declined to comment due to the sensitivity of the matter.
KAI chief executive officer Ha Sung-yong said that while South Korea’s conventional export markets such as cars and shipbuilding faced tough competition, its aerospace industry should grow strongly.
“Now that KAI has established the groundwork with its own technology, it is necessary to grow the industry ... by contributing to the national military’s force integration and creating jobs and exports,” Ha said.
LOCKHEED
The FA-50 is based on the T-50 advanced jet trainer, which is already in service in South Korea and was developed together with US defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
The T-50 can also be fitted with weapons under its wings and used as a light attack aircraft. Indonesia was the first export customer with a 2011 order for 16 T-50s, and Iraq is in negotiations to buy 24.
KAI and Lockheed are gearing up for a lucrative US Air Force competition for at least 300 aircraft and maybe hundreds more worth several billion dollars, a deal that one South Korean officer called the “jackpot.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts