Korean migrants drift north

By SIMON COLLINS

"This has got to be heaven on earth," says Yang-Chun (Shane) Cho.

He is standing on a muddy track in the desolate, wind-swept wasteland near Marsden Point where he has built a sawmill - or more precisely, a large, three-sided shelter open to the wind on the northern side. Under the shelter, three New Zealand and two Korean workers slice pine logs into exportable timber.

Cho, who was a computer programmer for Korean Telecom at home, poses happily for the photographer.

"I like trees," he says. In fact, he has named his business I Love Timber, ILT.

"I never thought of becoming a sawmill owner - I wanted to be working in ICT [information and communications technology]," he says. "But when I came here I saw this lumber business was more to my liking. It was not a behind-the-desk job. I just love timber - no reason."

Cho's investment of about $1.5 million in the sawmill is part of a surprising breakthrough for New Zealand's fast-growing Korean community, whose unfamiliarity with English has consigned many would-be investors to playing golf and going fishing.

In New Zealand, only 59 per cent of Korean men aged 25 to 64 were in paid work according to last year's census, compared with 82 per cent of New Zealand men overall. Only 38 per cent of Korean women, but 68 per cent of all New Zealand women, were in paid work.

In Auckland, where 69 per cent of the country's 30,000 Koreans live, many of those in paid work sell mainly to the Korean community through Korean restaurants, language schools, souvenir shops, food stores, real estate agents and car dealers.

But in Whangarei, where the Korean population is only 230, Korean investors are quietly beginning to employ New Zealanders in new export-oriented businesses, mainly aimed at selling to Korea.

Apart from Cho's ILT mill:

* Another Korean company, NZ Green Pine Ltd, has opened a small sawmill on Marsden Point Rd, also shipping to Korea.

* A third mill is under construction on land leased from NZ Green Pine.

* Another company plans a timber-drying kiln next to ILT.

* Entrepreneur Minjae Kim has bought the former Bradbury Wilkinson banknote factory at Onerahi and may turn it into an electronics factory. Berit International, co-owned by Kim and Ray Yang, is building three houses in Kamo.

* The Immanuel Church and a small language school, Immanuel International, have opened and employ four New Zealand teachers. They have 15 students and 60 booked for the summer.

* Immanuel is also an agent for Korean fee-paying students at local schools.

* Business partners Jin Suk Kim and Sek Hyun Nam have bought the Downtown BP petrol station and recently opened an internet cafe next-door, boasting Whangarei's first Korean-language sign.

* Three families have bought avocado farms.

* Two families have built golf driving ranges at the Whangarei and Sherwood Park golf courses.

* Another family has opened a Korean food outlet in a downtown food hall, serving mainly Kiwi customers.

"We want to introduce good New Zealand products to Korea and bring good Korean products to the New Zealand market," says Minjae Kim.

The influx of Koreans - almost all of whom have arrived in the past two years - is creating some social strains.

Many of the newcomers are rich and tend to drive late-model European cars in a region that has New Zealand's highest unemployment rate of 8.4 per cent.

While the Herald was at the Downtown BP station, a local man filling a petrol can asked Jin Suk Kim: "Do you know how many Asians there are in New Zealand now?"

Without waiting for an answer, the man said: "There are 115,000, and as far as I'm concerned they should all stay in Auckland!"

Twenty of Kamo High School's 1270 students are Koreans, and its international student director, Karen Crowe, says: "I am very reluctant to take any new students at this time of year. We have met our target of international students for this year.

"We have a range of students from a number of different cultures and we do not want to have one particular cultural group represented more than other cultures," she says.

At Whangarei Boys' High, which has 14 Koreans in a roll of 900, teachers say the language barrier makes it hard for Koreans.

"I have one little boy in the fourth form who is making a huge effort to fit in with the New Zealanders but says, 'I can't understand all the jokes and things'," one teacher says.

The number of Asians in Northland is minuscule - only 1.5 per cent of the population at last year's census, compared with 14 per cent in Auckland. And for the Koreans, whose top priority is their children's education, the scarcity of Asians is a big attraction.

"Not only Korean students but the other Asian students want to learn English but Auckland is already full, there are so many Asian students there," says Alex Kim, managing director of Immanuel International.

Merv Kim, of NZ Green Pine, who came to Whangarei five years ago when there were only two or three Korean families in town, has seen his two children graduate from Kamo High and go on to university.

"Whangarei is a nice place to live because I feel it's not so big, not so crowded," he says. "It's good for us for fishing, and there are a number of golf clubs here.

"A few years ago Whangarei was too quiet for the business, I think. But recently I feel many things are active and more people are coming to town. I think it's a good area."

It's also potentially profitable.

"Sawmilling is getting worse in Korea because of environmental and workers' problems, strike problems and those sorts of things," he says.

"It's a lot cheaper to mill here than there. Shipping costs are less, and we can buy the logs a little bit cheaper than in Korea."

Two elements in the Korean community seem to be important in their relative success.

One is the Immanuel Church, which claims 210 of the district's 230 Koreans.

"New families coming to Whangarei, we do everything for them," says Alex Kim. "We find a house for them, we find a car for them, we find a school for them."

Kim, who picked "Alex" for his English name because it means "the helper of mankind", was marketing manager for Chanel cosmetics in Seoul. He came to Auckland 10 years ago and was the first Korean to have a shop, The Sweet Factory, in the Downtown Shopping Centre. He moved to Whangarei in 1995.

"I was trying to purchase a lobster factory," he says. "But God had a different plan for me. He wanted me to come here and set up the church."

He and church pastor Michael Ro read about the sale of the Onerahi banknote plant in 1996 and went to have a look at it - a big, 1960s-style block high on a hill above the town, surrounded by pine trees and a barbed-wire fence dating from its days as a money factory.

"We started to pray that God will give us this place for a world mission centre. We started praying for five years," Kim says.

The church finally obtained a lease of the offices in late 1999, and Minjae Kim bought the property from Whangarei District Council last November.

Immanuel International runs only a language school there. But Alex Kim has plans for diplomas in theology, golf and ultimately medicine and other university subjects.

Another church member, Jimmy Chae, is the second key element in the Whangarei Koreans' business success. Although born in Korea, Chae went to New York at the age of 6 and is fluent in both Korean and English.

In the United States, he ran a family garment factory for 15 years. He made money but, he says, he drank and gambled it away. Then he became a Christian, joined Youth With A Mission, and found his way to New Zealand.

Peter Stanley, of Northland Planning Services, who has advised Korean businesses, says Chae explained the need for permits.

"In Korea they don't need to do anything like that. Naturally they come here, and unless someone tells them, they think it's the same as Korea," he says.

"It's a slow process and I take my hat off to Jimmy. If there were more people like that, the process of assimilation would be a lot better."

In Wellington, the Government has been pulling together a "wood processing strategy" for the past three years to try to get New Zealand's maturing pine forests processed here, rather than exported as raw logs. But Whangarei's Koreans have slipped in unaided and unnoticed by the Industry New Zealand officials who are running the strategy.

Mike Horgan of Investment NZ in Auckland was consulted, even though his mandate is to help people who are investing more than $5 million. He referred Stanley to Northland Grow, now called Enterprise Northland.

Its business and industry development manager, John Halse, says the agency is still gearing up to help.

"We understand that we need to proactively encourage investment by migrants coming into the region, but in terms of a structure to fulfil that it's simply too early in our development," he says.

"It's happening around us. Jimmy has been beating the bushes, and I think it makes a difference."

Minjae Kim is also making a difference. Aged 35, he began his career as an engineer at Hyundai's semiconductor research centre. In 1998, he and six friends left Hyundai and founded their own companies, each taking shares in the other's business.

One of the friends created the eCoin Card in Korea, a pre-paid alternative to a credit card for buying goods online, which is now worth more than $200 million. Kim owns 2.35 per cent of that company.

He founded the Korean Inspection and Testing Company, Kitco Ltd, which tests oil-drilling gear around the world. He travelled a lot, and moved to New Zealand a year ago.

"It is a good country and a good environment," he says.

Using his Korean connections, he is exploring a possible niche for making notebook computers and thin film transistor liquid crystal display screens in Whangarei.

"We can export to other countries because 'Made in New Zealand' is a good image, more than 'Made in China' or Malaysia," he says.

"In Korea it's the same labour rate as New Zealand, or more expensive, now. And it's more difficult for the company management in Korea - a lot of tax, a lot of labour argument if there is something like a strike."

He is also trying to interest local companies in Korean technologies for things such as running phone calls through power lines and stripping calcium deposits out of stainless steel containers - a potentially valuable service for the dairy industry.

Merv Kim of NZ Green Pine also has big ambitions. He is bringing importers from Korea to look into buying health food from a North Shore factory.

Not all of these ventures will succeed. A sawmill built by Kim's brother at the Whangarei port in 1996 closed last year because of what Kim says were "financial difficulties" and "lack of business operational experience".

Nor are these investments unique. A draft report by Korean economists last year counted 42 Korean investments in New Zealand worth a total of $42 million. A joint venture between Korea's Hansol and Ngati Porou runs 10,000ha of forests on the East Coast.

Josephine Kim, a lawyer at Russell McVeagh in Auckland, says Korean investors own several million dollars worth of Auckland commercial buildings. Another lawyer, Marcus Beveridge of Davenports, says big new property developments are imminent.

Koreans have established "hundreds" of vegetable farms in South Auckland, an ostrich farm at Galatea, and companies exporting dairy produce, deer products, meat, vegetables, mussels, honey and natural health products.

Phillip Park, president of Seoul's Shinsegae Emigration Service, says New Zealand and Canada are now attracting 35 per cent each of Korea's total emigrants.

He puts New Zealand's popularity down to six factors: "Good green nature, small population, good education system, good welfare system, not much racism compared with other countries and low living costs."

Josephine Kim believes many Koreans are taking up the new long-term business visas, introduced in 1999, which turn into residence permits after three years only if people have owned a local business for at least two years or qualify on other grounds.

Immigration Service spokesman Ian Smith says all business migrants "are invited to contact the Business Migrant Liaison Unit (Settlement), who act as a clearing house/referral service to other organisations such as Biz Info, industry sector groups, economic development agencies, etc".

But none of the Koreans interviewed used this service. As Merv Kim puts it: "They [Koreans] can't contact people readily because of language barriers and a lack of information."

Immigration agent Bill Milnes of the Association for Migration and Investment says one solution would be to raise the English language requirement for migrants from level 5 - the ability to conduct a basic conversation, with mistakes - to level 6. The Cabinet has ordered officials to report on the language test by Christmas.

Ministers are also reviewing the criteria for entry under the investor category after a recent survey found that 46 per cent of all investors were absent from New Zealand at the time of the survey.

But a former director of the Korean Society in Auckland, Chris Yoo, says the biggest need is for places where new businesses can lease space and share information, including access to people who speak Korean.

Stanley says there is still a huge language and cultural gap to be bridged.

"It's all very well for Immigration to bring people like Koreans into the country and say, 'We'll have your money thanks'. I don't think it's enough," he says. "They should have a workforce of people like Jimmy out there bridging the gaps. Otherwise they just end up playing golf and bugger off back to Korea."

Further reading
Feature: Immigration