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North Korea has offered a Kaesong tourism project to Lotte Tourism after falling out with Hyundai Asan, which had already started pilot tours to the city.
A Lotte Tourism spokesman said Tuesday the company¡¯s president Kim Ki-byung, who was in Pyongyang to watch the 2005 Pyongyang Open golf tournament, on Aug. 29 had a verbal proposal to try the Kaesong tourism project from Choi Sung-chol of North Korea's Asia Pacific Peace Committee.
He said no written offer has been received but Pyongyang agreed to contact Lotte again soon. He said the company would decide whether to take on the project after studying its viability.
The Lotte Tourism president Kim (67) is originally from Wonsan in North Korea's South Hamgyong Province. He came South with his family after liberation.
A railway tourism project to Kaesong through "KTX Tourism Leisure", a joint investment by Lotte and Korea Railroad, got permission from the Unification Ministry in March to hold talks with the North, and in May sent a business plan and corporate introduction form to Pyingyang. A Lotte Tourism staffer said, "The North Korean offer was separate from the Kaesong railway tourism project, and under inter-Korean economic cooperation laws we would need government permission and have to watch the project situation."
He said the offer ¡°seems to be an attempt by the North Koreans, who are getting ever more business-savvy, to diversify their business partners, while at the same time boosting profits by joining hands with specialized tourism firms." He said since Lotte Tourism handles 40 percent of the marketing for Hyundai Asan¡¯s Kumgang Mountains tourism project, ¡°it's best that Hyundai's North Korea projects do well.¡± He said Lotte was ¡°perplexed¡± when the offer came at a time of tensions between North Korea and Hyundai Asan.
According to the staffer, Kim Ki-byung received three or four proposals from the North in the early 1990s, including an offer for an overland tourism project to the North's Kumgang Mountains by North Korean vice premier Kim Dal-hyun in Beijing in 1991. During the Kim Dae-jung administration, he was asked by high-ranking government officials whether he might try his hand at tourism projects in North Korea but the company demurred because it had doubts about their viability.
Kim Ki-byung is the husband of Lotte Group president Shin Kyuk-ho's sister Shin Kyung-hee, but Lotte Tourism, the nation's third-largest travel company, is not a subsidiary of the group.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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