Search Results for: "of fools and their money"

November 19, 2015

Of fools and their money: Martyn Williams on Orascom’s North Korea fiasco

Martyn Williams of the North Korea Tech blog has a must-read story at IT World about how Orascom’s investment in North Korea’s Koryolink mobile phone service “went horribly wrong.” That such a headline can be written is, by itself, a stunning reversal. During the early years of Kim Jong-Un’s reign, Koryolink was the poster child for more sanguine North Korea watchers, who believed that once a Swiss-educated reformer had taken the throne, a Pyongyang Spring must surely follow. For the...

Categories Engagement/NK Economics
August 31, 2014

Of fools and their money: Volvo sold North Korea 1,000 cars. On credit.

As a tool of economic isolation, North Korea’s business ethics have proven to be far more effective than U.N. sanctions. See also Yang Bin, Senator Robert Torricelli and David Chang, Chung Mong Hun, Nigel Cowie, Roh Jeong-Ho, Albert Yeung Sau Shing and the Emperor Group, the Xiyang Group, and Lloyd’s of London. There’s actually a whole market in North Korea’s defaulted sovereign debt “involving more than 100 banks from 17 countries” dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. And still,...

Categories Engagement
May 1, 2010

Of Fools and Their Money, Cont.

Will the North Korean money pit sink the Hyundai Group? The financial health of the Hyundai Group began to deteriorate when it started pouring huge amounts of money into its North Korean business in 1998. Hyundai Merchant Marine, the core part of the Hyundai Group accounting for over 80 percent of the group’s total assets, had been supporting Hyundai Asan but was hit badly by the global recession. Last year, it saw sales fall by more than 20 percent from...

Categories North-South/Sunshine
April 10, 2010

Of Fools and Their Money, Pt. 3: Thoughts on the End of Kumgang

North Korea has announced that it will make good on its threat to confiscate the South Korean property at the Kumgang tourist project. In a statement on Thursday, the North’s Guidance Bureau for Comprehensive Development of Scenic Spots, which is in charge of the tourism, said it is seizing a meeting hall for separated families built by the South Korean government, and a cultural hall, a hot spring spa, and a duty-free shop owned by the Korea Tourism Organization, as...

Categories NK Economics/Sunshine
February 19, 2009

Of Fools and Their Money, Part 2: Orascom Deal Starts to Sour

That Orascom’s big new investment in North Korea would fail has always been predictable, but it was always incomprehensible how Orascom’s business model centered around introducing the one thing with the most potential to destabilize the regime’s hold on power: a mobile phone network. Not surprisingly, Orascom and the North Korean regime are already at odds over Orascom’s plan to pass out 100,000 free phones to generate a base of bill-paying subscribers. Instead, the regime is selling them for $235...

Categories NK Economics
December 18, 2008

Of Fools and Their Money

When North Korea first started ejecting South Koreans from Kaesong, I noted that the Kaesong project was already economically marginal and falling well short of its ambitious goals. I also predicted that the North Korean move would be fatal to the project’s efforts to coax cowardly capital into a potential war zone controlled by the world’s most opaque, least capital-friendly regime. That prediction has already come true. The leftist Hankyoreh is reporting that South Korean companies are fleeing for the...

Categories NK Economics
May 11, 2010

Kaesong Death Watch

Alternate title: Of fools and their money. North Korea has led a delegation of Chinese investors on a tour of the Kaesong Industrial Complex. Would the North Koreans really confiscate Kaesong as they did Kumgang and hand it over to the Chinese? I sure as hell wish they would. Nothing would please me more than such an ineradicable deterrent to foreign investment, such a thorough repudiation of the Sunshine Policy, and the closure of Kaesong’s money pipe to Pyongyang. Alas,...

Categories China & Korea/NK Economics