Invest KOREA

According to Yonhap News,

(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Gwon Hye-jin

To facilitate the research and development (R&D) of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), taxation support, including a special tax system for incomes from technology transfers, will be introduced. Additional support measures for funding and employers will also be implemented.

The Korean government held the third meeting of the National Science & Technology Council last week to finalize R&D investment facilitation measures.

◇ The Korean Government Developed Comprehensive Measures to Facilitate R&D of SMEs

The Korean government will grant a 50 percent exemption of corporate and income taxes by introducing a new special tax system for SME income from technology transfers. It will also allow tax deductions for R&D in five promising service industries, including additional communication, publishing and movies and research development support projects.

Considering the corporate circumstances of SMEs, which have difficulty finding funding, an R&D guarantee system, which had previously been operated by only the Korea Technology Finance Corporation, will also be provided by the Korea Credit Guarantee Fund. The amount deducted and a deduction rate for angel investment will be increased to 50 percent.

The Korean government also developed measures to solve a shortage of employees. It will dispatch to SMEs a higher number of young people working as researchers instead of providing military service, and also allocate human resources to new industries of SMEs.

To support research training and boost inventions, incentives will also be provided to companies that encourage inventions.

These measures aim to vitalize the R&D of SMEs, as only one percent of SMEs has their own research institutes, whereas 99 percent of Korean companies are SMEs. They plan to facilitate the R&D of SMEs by alleviating tax-related grievances, a shortage of manpower, funding and more.

Minister of Science, ICT and Future Planning Choi Moon-ki noted that the Korean government aimed to develop comprehensive measures to strengthen the R&D capabilities of SMEs and improve the investment climate so that companies can increase their R&D investment and grow into global companies.

◇ Korea Aims to Improve R&D Evaluations

The National Science & Technology Council also finalized measures to enhance the performance evaluations of national R&D projects. The measures will give more weight to the qualitative part of the projects, as there have been concerns regarding the qualitative, instead of quantitative, growth of Korea’s R&D projects.

The new evaluation criterion looks at the scientific, technological, economic and social performance of projects and their impact on infrastructure and is based on a total of 109 evaluation items.

About three items from each area will be selected and given weight in future evaluations of R&D projects.

However, this criterion will not apply to innovative projects, which aim to promote creative and inventive research.

Follow-up evaluations will also be made after the completion of projects to examine the use and sharing of results.

The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning will establish a performance evaluation plan for next year by the end of the year and apply it when assessing the performances of national R&D projects next year.

lucid@yna.co.kr

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