| GS Group Chairman Huh Chang-soo |
By Yoon Sung-won
GS Group Chairman Huh Chang-soo said group affiliates need to seek new business opportunities to survive rapid industry changes in the future.
During the group's strategy meeting of chief executives in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province, the chairman underlined that each affiliate must keep track of new technologies such as self-driving cars, renewable energy sources and the Internet of Things (IoT), and should understand possible opportunities and risks in market changes.
"Changes always accompany both opportunities and risks," Huh said, Friday. "In order to seek new business opportunities no matter what risks may come, we need to be able to notice changes, execute aggressively to create future income sources, train new talent who can preemptively deal with changes and cultivate a flexible corporate culture."
During the two-day meeting between Friday and Saturday, Huh met with over 60 CEOs of the group's major affiliates including his younger brother GS Caltex CEO and Vice President Huh Jin-soo.
In particular, the chairman urged the executives to remain vigilant in industrial changes.
"Those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn will be the illiterate of the 21st century," Huh said citing the comment by late futurist Alvin Toffler. "Whereas enterprises that recognized changes and reacted to them have won the market, those that failed to understand the changes and repeated their old ways are continuing to die out. I would like to ask you to make efforts not to be illiterate of changes."
The group said Huh has repetitively emphasized in recent executive meetings the importance of understanding market changes caused by new technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality and the IoT.
GS Group has hosted the annual strategy meeting of chief executives for the last 12 years since 2005.
In this year's meeting, the participants discussed how to strengthen the group's new business focal points such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, discovering new material for secondary battery cells and introducing renewable energy sources such as bio-butanol. They also agreed to make timely investments to shift business structure from fossil fuel-based items to renewable energy sources while pushing to introduce smart grid technology.