Written by Eden Jang, BCC Global Media Content Editor
Edited by Winston Kim, BCC Global Media Managing Director
An interview with Youngjin Choi, Executive Vice-President, Hanwha Asset Management
On July 6th, a CEIBS Global EMBA delegation visited Hanwha Asset Management through a program hosted by BCC Global. They met Youngjin Choi, EVP and Head of the Strategic Business Division, who also serves as Chief Marketing Officer.
Mr. Choi has led Hanwha’s pension-solutions expansion and launched its LifePlus TDF line, but he is best known for rebranding the group’s ETF franchise from “ARIRANG” to “PLUS.” The results are on the tape. Hanwha’s ETF assets under management have crossed 10 trillion Korean won — roughly $6.7 billion — placing the firm among Korea’s leading ETF managers, and have tripled in the nineteen months since the rebrand. Its US-listed K-defense ETF now holds close to $200 million (about 300 billion won), and the firm has since listed a Korean manufacturing active ETF in the United States, taking Korean industrial themes offshore for the first time at scale.
The conversation ranged across supply-chain restructuring, the AI-energy complex, and the US-China rivalry — and kept returning to a single question: what, exactly, is Korea’s franchise? Edited excerpts follow.
BCC Global Media: Korean and Chinese equities both look stretched right now. Which market offers the stronger long-term case — and does Korea really have a defensible industry to build that case on? Taiwan has semiconductors; Japan and Europe have shipbuilding and heavy engineering. Korea often just seems “good at many things.”
EVP Choi: I’d push back on the framing before answering it. The search for one defensible industry is the wrong search. Korea’s advantage isn’t any single sector — it’s the connective tissue between them. But to see why that matters now, you have to start about three decades back.
BCC Global Media: Meaning the shift in global manufacturing?
EVP Choi: Yes. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the advanced economies struck a tacit bargain: keep design, planning, and brand at home, and send the factories to China and other low-cost bases. That held for a generation, and it hollowed out the very manufacturing muscle that had made those countries powerful before the world wars. The United States still fields extraordinary specialists — a SpaceX, a Boeing — but its broad industrial base has thinned. Rich nations ended up dependent on production networks they no longer control. What was once an accounting detail is now a strategic exposure.
BCC Global Media: And that exposure is what turned the supply chain into a geopolitical issue rather than an efficiency one.
EVP Choi: Exactly. Because output is concentrated in a handful of regions and suppliers, a single shock — a pandemic, the war in Ukraine, a threatened closure of the Strait of Hormuz — can seize up the entire system. That’s why diversification has moved to the top of every government and boardroom agenda. The defining contest of the coming decade isn’t who holds the best individual technology. It’s who can build, control, and sustain the most resilient chain.
BCC Global Media: Where does artificial intelligence fit into that contest?
EVP Choi: It’s where the contest is sharpest. As AI becomes a proxy for national strength and corporate survival, the hyperscalers have entered a capital-expenditure supercycle — racing to lay down GPUs, data centers, power systems, and the energy networks that feed them. But the real bottleneck increasingly isn’t silicon. It’s electricity.
BCC Global Media: Why electricity specifically?
EVP Choi: Because the arithmetic is unforgiving. Nuclear power could answer AI’s appetite, but a new plant takes more than a decade to build. In the interim, you have to stitch together transitional supply — solar by day, energy-storage systems by night. And the fuel itself has to travel: American shale gas has to be liquefied, compressed, shipped, and landed in Europe. So you get a further question — who commands the LNG carriers and the wider energy-transport chain? My point is that AI, energy, semiconductors, data centers, power grids, storage, and LNG shipping should no longer be read as separate sectors. They’re components of one strategic infrastructure.
BCC Global Media: Which brings us back to Korea. If not a single industry, then what?
EVP Choi: Korea already commands strong core technology, and it’s pouring capital into its semiconductor base. Sustained over the next five to ten years, that spending could preserve a genuine edge. But the larger prize is in the adjacencies — energy, electricity, batteries, shipbuilding, data centers, defense, aerospace, advanced manufacturing — and in Korea’s rare ability to wire them together into something coherent and globally relevant. Taiwan’s strength is concentrated; that’s both its moat and its fragility. Korea’s may be its breadth.
BCC Global Media: Your PLUS lineup — K-defense, global HBM semiconductors, aerospace and urban air mobility, high dividend — reads like a portfolio expression of exactly that argument. Is that deliberate?
EVP Choi: It’s the whole point. A thesis that can’t be expressed in a product is just commentary. So we built the range around the industries where Korean manufacturing is genuinely competitive: semiconductors, defense, shipbuilding, autos, power equipment. The market has validated it faster than we expected. Since the rebrand from ARIRANG to PLUS nineteen months ago, our ETF assets have roughly tripled, and total ETF AUM has passed $6.7 billion — 10 trillion won. That moves us into the front rank of Korean ETF managers.
BCC Global Media: And the offshore push?
EVP Choi: That’s the more interesting development, because it tests whether the Korea story travels. Our US-listed K-defense ETF has gathered close to $200 million, which tells you that American investors will underwrite a Korean industrial theme when the theme is credible. We’ve since listed a Korean manufacturing active ETF in the United States as well. Three years ago the premise of selling Korean manufacturing exposure to a US buyer would have struck most people as eccentric. Supply-chain restructuring changed that.
BCC Global Media: You’ve compared the current moment to the Cold War. How far does that analogy run?
EVP Choi: Reasonably far. The Soviet Union spent heavily on defense but ultimately buckled under an American-led financial and trade order — one underwritten by the dollar’s grip on oil settlement and global finance. Today’s US-China rivalry is being waged through much the same instruments: technology, manufacturing, energy, and financial plumbing. And there’s one point I’d stress. China’s manufacturing scale is hard for Washington to confront head-on, which makes energy the more plausible pressure point. Constrain China’s power supply, and its ability to scale factories and compute slows with it. Energy security isn’t adjacent to the geopolitical fight — it is the fight.
BCC Global Media: So what does Korea actually have to do to hold the position you’re describing?
EVP Choi: Two things at once. First, read the macro board carefully — the moves of Washington, Beijing, Brussels, NATO — and position as a linchpin across semiconductors, energy, defense, shipbuilding, batteries, data centers, and advanced manufacturing, rather than as a one-sector specialist. Second, sustain it. That means “super-gap” technology — leads wide enough that rivals can’t easily close them — paired with diplomatic dexterity and deliberate alignment across several partners rather than dependence on one.
BCC Global Media: And as an investor, how do you position for something that unfolds over a decade?
EVP Choi: You accept that the horizon is long and you build for it. Our capital is concentrated in the industries that a restructuring of the US-China supply chain should reward over years, not quarters — semiconductors, defense, shipbuilding, autos, power equipment. Nineteen months of asset growth is encouraging, but it isn’t the thesis. The thesis is what those industries look like in 2035.
BCC Global Media: If you had to leave investors with a single takeaway?
EVP Choi: Stop grading Korea on the quarter’s index moves or on any one industry. The sharper question is whether Korea can make itself an indispensable node in the next global value chain — the bridge across the strategic industries that AI, energy security, supply-chain reshoring, and geopolitical fragmentation are now fusing together. Not the next Taiwan. Something harder to replace: the connector everyone needs.