[Interview] 'When in South Korea, do as Southerners do'

Kim Hong-kyun, the founder of trucking company S.P. Transport / Courtesy of Korea Hana Foundation

This is a fifth in a series of interviews with North Korean defectors and their assimilation into South Korea―ED.

Self-made businessman advises fellow North Korean defectors to hang in there, think like South Koreans, if they want to succeed

By Kang Hyun-kyung

Kim Hong-kyun seems to be the man who can literally "make a living by selling sand to desert people." Koreans use the phrase "doing sand business in the desert" to refer to people with exceptional business and survival skills.

In the desert, sand is everywhere, so common that few people believe one can make ends meet there by selling sand. As always, however, people with extraordinary business acumen discover opportunities in areas that others overlook. With persistent effort and a never-give-up attitude, they achieve things that initially looked to be impossible.

Kim, 59, is such a person. He saw business opportunities in a trucking company when he arrived in South Korea in 2001, 11 years after he left North Korea for Russia as a forestry worker.

Now, two decades after his arrival in South Korea, the North Korean defector runs S.P. Transport, a thriving trucking business.

He employs four South Korean truckers. They deliver cargo loaded on 25-ton trucks every day, all across the country.

Times are tough. The oil price hikes stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine have negatively affected his business.

But Kim showed confidence in his business.

"Such a risk is manageable," he said during a recent Korea Times interview. "The revenue is almost the same but profit has gone down because of soaring oil prices. Despite this, my business still generates profit, albeit with a smaller margin than before. Like other businesses, trucking companies have ups and downs and we are going through a tough time."

Kim founded his transportation startup 15 years ago after working various part-time and full-time jobs to earn seed money to start his own business.

There were times when he felt the pinch so hard that his wife had to use her savings to pay her husband's debt to the bank. In the early years of his business, he said he struggled to understand South Korea's tax and audit system and tried to find a reliable tax accountant. While having gone through various challenges, his business is now stable.

All truckers in his company are South Koreans. There are no North Korean defectors or migrant workers. He did not hire experienced drivers, either. All the truckers he hired were those who had no prior experience in the trucking business.

"People who are familiar with my hiring practices told me that I was crazy. Since I was a first-time employer in the trucking business at that time, they thought I needed to hire experienced truckers who knew the way of the business," he said. "But I didn't follow their advice. If the truckers are experienced and know a lot more about the industry than I do, I thought they could cheat me."

When asked about his supposedly biased employment policy filtering out North Korean defectors, he said he realized through prior experience that they were not suitable for trucking companies.

He said most of the North Koreans he had met were daydreamers, explaining his work experience with North Korean workers in Russia for several years. He was in a business partnership with four or five North Korean defectors to start a cell-phone related business in China, which was illegal because he was an undocumented alien there.

More than anything else, encounters with North Korean defectors in Hanawon, the resettlement center for North Korean defectors, in his first three months in the South attending a mandatory adaption program was decisive in shaping his negative impressions.

"Some bragged of their education in the North, and some spoke about their future business plans which I thought lacked details, so were highly likely to fail. They were too naive. I met many North Korean defectors who said they can succeed in the South if they have money," he said.

To adapt to the capitalist South, he said, North Korean defectors need to think like Southerners and do business like South Koreans.

"I tell fellow North Korean defectors that they need to forget what they learned in the North if they want to succeed in the South," he said. "In the workplace, they complain about Southerners being disrespectful. When I hear this, I tell them to ignore it and try to prove themselves. I also tell them to hang in there until they figure out who they are and what they can do best."

Kim Hong-kyun poses in front of his truck in this undated photo. Courtesy of Korea Hana Foundation

Business is in Kim's genes. This helped him smoothly adapt to South Korean society.

His mother owned a restaurant, which later became something of a franchise business in the North.

"In North Korea, businesspeople were not respected. So, if you say you are a merchant or make a living through your own business, your counterpart will have a negative impression of you because of the bad reputation of businesspeople. This was so in the 1980s when my mother was running her own restaurant," he said. "People called her 'Mrs. Snobbish.' She was a tough lady with an extensive network of influential people."

In a way, Kim's mother was a trailblazer as she started her business in the 1980s, two decades before markets popped up and sprawled all across the North.

"It was at a time when the North Korean economy was reeling from the failed international sports event the North hosted in the 1980s. Facing a liquidity crisis, the North Korean authorities eased restrictions on business and allowed some to do their own business," he said.

Through his mother who was a restauranteur, Kim came to be accustomed to the ideas of expenses, profits and revenues since his childhood.

Kim's "international experiences" helped him hone his business acumen.

He went to Russia's southeastern city of Khabarovsk in May 1990 as a logger. He said he had never been to the mountains for logging all during his six years in Russia. Instead, he worked as a cashier and procurement officer responsible for purchasing meat and fresh vegetables in the local market to feed the North Korean loggers.

"What kinds of meals the North Korean workers eat depends on who the procurement officer is. I tried to get quality meat and fresh vegetables after bargaining with the Russians," he said.

In 1996, six years after his arrival in Russia, he fled to China with the goal to defect to South Korea. Back then, he said, the Russian-Chinese border was porous because of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He lived in China for four years as an illegal alien before he arrived in South Korea in 2001.