Korea tops in R&D investment growth

Korea Herald ^ | 2005.10.25 | Hwang Si-young

[nickcarraway]

With its innovation spending soaring last year, Korea ranked first in terms of growth in research and development investment.

Korea saw a sweeping increase in R&D expenditure with its leading companies increasing their innovation investment by 40 percent last year, U.K.'s Department of Trade and Industry's R&D Scoreboard 2005 revealed yesterday.

The country's largest carmaker Hyundai Motor Co. saw its R&D budget more than double over last year's to $1.73 billion, while Samsung Electronics Co. boosted its R&D spending by 77 percent over the last four years with $4.44 billion in total.

Eleven Korean companies were included in the list of the global 1,000 R&D-active companies.

Korea and Taiwan are increasing their investment in innovation rapidly as a way of staying ahead of China, according to the Times. Taiwan's R&D expenditure rose by 14 percent to $2.48 billion, with 22 of its companies making the scoreboard.

The report showed that R&D spending by the global 1,000 R&D-active companies rose by 5 percent to $390.9 billion, compared to a year ago. Germany's DaimlerChrysler and Siemens took first and fifth place on the scoreboard, with R&D spending of $7.69 billion and $7.68 billion, respectively.

The United States remained first in software innovation, despite a fall in investment by Microsoft whose R&D spending dropped by 21 percent last year to $5.68 billion.