▲ Hyosung Group Chairman Cho Hyun-joon(left) and Quzhou Party Secretary Chen Xin

Hyosung Group Chairman Cho Hyun-joon met China’s Quzhou City Communist Party Secretary Chen Xin after a 1-year hiatus. Cho has maintained a global network with influential figures abroad.

Chen visited Cho in the group head office in Gongdeok-dong, Seoul, on July 18 and they discussed how a new factory in Quzhou was doing and ways of cooperation. The construction of the factory was completed in the first half of this year.

The latest meeting came a year after their last one in Quzhou City in July last year. At that time, Cho promised to Chen to “develop a spandex and NF3 factory under construction in Quzhou into an axis of major Hyosung production bases in China.”

Quzhou is known to share a close bond with Hyosung Chairman Cho. The city named a downtown main street “Hyosung Boulevard” after the Korean business group in a show of its gratitude for investing in the city.

In the late 1990s, Cho emphasized that Hyosung needed to penetrate the Chinese market first to take global leadership in spandex business and he entered the market with “C(China) Project Team” he formed.

Hyosung Group Chairman Cho’s spandex business took the largest share in the Chinese market in 2007. It came five years after a spandex factory in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province began a full-blown operation. Using this as a foothold, Hyosung has held the status of world’s No.1 spandex maker since 2010.

Chen became the youngest party secretary of Quzhou City, Zhejiang Province in 2012, and has since led the construction and development of a provincial industrial complex in the city area. He is in charge of building China-Korea Industrial Cooperation Complex within Quzhou National High-tech Industrial Park. The new complex will deal mostly with fine chemicals, silicon and biochemistry.