Harry Rudolph, the Executive Vice President of Delphi Korea had an interview with DGFEZ team to talk about Delphi Korea’s operations in Daegu, Korea, changes in the Korea automotive industry, and doing business in South Korea.
Q1. Can you tell us about Delphi Korea?
Delphi Automotive is a global automotive company, one of the largest in the world, and we’re located in 30 countries around the world and have over a hundred-thousand employees. In Korea we also have a fairly large business with several subsidiaries and joint ventures and we have about three-thousand employees in Korea, and we’re making a broad-range of automotive components and selling to all of the Korean car makers.
Q2. Can you explain Delphi Korea’s logistics?
A. Our company, we’re located in several cities around Korea, but we do have a large operation here in Daegu. We’re not in the DGFEZ area, but not too far away, and for thirty years we’ve had excellent access to all of our customers. With our products we have to deliver just in time, at least to the Korean customers, so we have to have parts at our customer dock within four hours, and so all of our customers are located within four hours. And then, usually by truck, and then we also ship to overseas customers and we’re within ninety minutes of the Busan port, so we’ve got great access to global shipping as well.
Q3. How has Delphi Korea changed since your arrival?
A. When I first came here, our local company was designing, building and shipping parts almost exclusively for the Korean market, so our customers were located in Korea, and the cars were sold in Korea. Now it’s changed a lot, it’s a global business; our parts are operating in hundred and forty countries around the world, either because our customers are shipping their cars around the world, or we ship our products directly to customers around the world. So much more a global business now. Our engineers are on the phone daily with their colleagues in North America, Europe, Brazil, etc. So that is probably the biggest change that I’ve seen.
