South Korea’s trade negotiators plan to call for their Chinese counterpart not to discriminate against Korean firms operating in the country in of favor homegrown competitors, antirust regulatory officials said Thursday.

According to the Fair Trade Commission, the request will likely be made during the second round of negotiations to conclude a bilateral free trade agreement, slated for next week.

FTC officials said the negotiators are seeking to reach a consensus on nondiscrimination between Chinese and Korean firms in the Chinese government’s application of its competition law under a possible FTA.

“Some Korean companies operating in the country were found to have suffered from lack of transparency in the Chinese government’s application of the competition law,” said an FTC official.

Samsung Display, LG Display and four other non-Chinese LCD panel manufacturers were subject to antitrust regulatory fines totaling 353 million yuan ($58 million) for an alleged cartel earlier this year without opportunity for appeal.

As China introduced the competition law only five years ago, it still lags behind major countries in securing the rights of foreign businesses, said FTC officials.

Meanwhile, a recent poll showed that only about half of Korean companies operating in China end up successful, despite actively making inroads into the country.

According to the survey on 212 Korean firms, conducted by the Korea International Trade Association’s Shanghai office, 56 percent of the firms assessed their business in China as “successful.”

KITA said 33.5 percent of the respondents said their business in China was neither “very good” nor “very bad.”

Further, 9.4 percent of them said they failed for the most part and 1.4 percent said they failed exceedingly.

The poll also showed that 45.3 percent saw China’s homegrown firms as their largest competitors, while 34.4 percent picked other foreign firms as their main rivals.

By Kim Yon-se
(kys@heraldcorp.com)