While America panics at the apparently unassailable Japanese dominance of the flat-panel display market, South Korea just decides its an industry with great promise for volume exports and mobilises – it was only in April that South Korea moved to offer would-be flat-panel manufacturers a string of incentives including research funds, tariff reductions for importing equipment, and easier access to land for factories, Associated Press reports, and the initiative has inspired Goldstar Co and Samsung Electronics Co to get on with it, and next year, each expects to begin production of thin film transistor-liquid crystal displays: Samsung says it plans to start making 60,000 a month at its existing chip complex in Kiheung, just outside Seoul, while Goldstar plans to start making 50,000 a month next May on a $375m production line being built in its Kumi electronics complex in central South Korea; Samsung is targeting 100,000 a month by late 1996, and investment of $625m by 1998, Goldstar expects to have invested $800m by 1997 to achieve output of 100,000 a month.
