S. Korea to invest in home appliance base

S. Korea to invest in home appliance base

SEOUL (AFP): South Korea's Goldstar Co. will invest US$580 million in Indonesia over the next five years to build a joint- venture home appliance production base, a company spokesman said yesterday.

"We opted for Indonesia to build it as a strategic, comprehensive production base in the Southeast Asian region," said the spokesman, adding that Indonesia would emerge as its third largest operation outside South Korea and China.

It will establish a new Indonesian joint venture within the year with an initial investment of $160 million to produce three million color television tubes a year.

Golstar's investment in the joint venture will swell to $510 million by 2000, raising its annual production capacity to 10- million tubes, and also allow manufacture of core TV parts such as deflection yokes, flyback transformers and computer monitors. New production lines are scheduled to operate in the latter half of 1996, the spokesman said.

Goldstar will pour another $70 million into PT Goldstar Astra, its existing Indonesian joint-venture, to set up new production lines for 100,000 washing machines and another 100,000 air conditioners a year.

The joint venture will be supplemented by new production lines for color televisions and refrigerators, from the current 200,000 and 70,000 units a year to one million and 200,000 units each by 2000.

PT Goldstar Astra, established in 1991 at a cost of $13 million, chalked up $22 million in sales last year. Its sales projections for 1994 and 1995 are $46 million and $100 million respectively, the spokesman said.

A Goldstar official said products from the Indonesian joint- ventures would be exported to neighboring Asian countries and other world markets, as well as sold in the promising Indonesian market.

Goldstar has been actively strengthening offshore production bases, setting up color television and video cassette recorder factories in China, expanding color television factories in Mexico, and building other electronics factories in Britain.