BUSAN < invest Korea

Global firms are continuing to invest in Busan City. Lina Korea Insurance Company, and global IT company LG CNS are both opening major premises in Busan City. Lina Korea, the Korean subsidiary of Cigna, will open a contact center with 500 cubicles, and LG CNS will open up the city’s biggest cloud data center.

Busan City signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Lina Korea on July 5 at Busan City Hall, committing the insurance firm to setting up the Lina Korea Insurance Busan Contact Center. Some 200 of its cubicles will be operational this year, with the remainder opening by the end of 2012. The center hopes to create 500 new jobs and generate 21 billion won’s ($19.7 million) worth of economic effects.

On June 28, Busan City and LG CNS signed a separate MOU to construct the Global Cloud Data Center Hub. Under the terms of this agreement, Busan City will provide a site for the center at Mieum industrial estate, part of the Busan-Jinhae Free Economic Zone Authority, while LG CNS will be in charge of construction and operations. The data center will be about 15 times the size of a soccer field, making it the largest such facility in Korea. By December 2012, LG CNS will construct a 23,000 square meter facility with 72,000 server computers. The company will then work on expanding it further.

The facility is initially expected to recruit around 400 people, but taking into account construction, operation of the facility and management support, Busan City is confident that the entire project will create around 30,000 new jobs.

Source: Yonhap News (July 16, 2011)