'Cluster dynamics' now drive outbound investment for Korean firms, says Cushman & Wakefield -

Sydney Chun, head of the Global Korea Desk at Cushman & Wakefield Korea, poses for a photo during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at the Korean branch’s office in western Seoul. [CUSHMAN & WAKEFIELD KOREA]

[INTERVIEW]

Despite semiconductor heavyweights accounting for more than 40 percent of Kospi market value, it is Korean automakers and battery makers that have led the charge in outbound investment, rapidly establishing supply chain footholds across the United States, according to a senior executive at the Korean branch of a major commercial real estate services firm.

“Hyundai Motor Group’s U.S. and European expansion is the most viable example, but the battery ecosystem around it — SK On, Samsung SDI and LG Energy Solution — has moved with extraordinary speed,” said Sydney Chun, head of the Global Korea Desk at Cushman & Wakefield Korea, in a recent interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at the Korean branch’s office in central Seoul.

“Semiconductors, on the other hand, are investing heavily but are only at the starting stage. The capital expenditure and planning horizons are longer, and the technology requirements are more complex. Samsung’s Taylor investment in Texas is a landmark, but a broader semiconductor supply chain — materials, equipment and packaging — is only beginning to follow.”

Chun’s team supports Korean conglomerates through the entire arc of global expansion from site selection, incentive negotiations and marketing representation to transaction brokerages for overseas offices. Most recently, the team secured a three-year master services agreement with Hyundai Motor in October 2025 under which C & W Korea is managing the restructuring of the automaker’s entire global commercial real estate portfolio. The team is also close to finalizing the Washington office setup for a Korean shipbuilder — a move that follows Korea’s $150 billion shipbuilding investment pledge to the United States.

The Washington trend is broader than a single deal.

“There’s been a sharp increase in Korean companies wanting to set up offices there,” Chun said. “Doing business in the U.S. now requires maintaining good relationships with the administration and making sure the standing of Korean businesses is visible — what our brands are, what kind of businesses we’re running. That visibility is directly tied to securing tax incentives.”

On the question of what is actually driving outbound investment, Chun was direct. The critical trigger is tariffs, not incentive programs.

A double-digit tariff on exports makes staying put economically unsustainable, turning localization from a strategic preference into a necessity. Nor is this a uniquely Korean story — European automakers, Japanese chipmakers and Taiwanese foundries are all navigating the same pressure to diversify their supply chains.

“Supply chains globally have become more fragile — whether from pandemics, geopolitical friction, logistics disruptions or trade policy whiplash. Every multinational, not just Korean ones, is wrestling with the same localization questions.”

What distinguishes the current investment cycle from previous ones is the cluster dynamic.

“When Hyundai builds in Georgia, it’s not an isolated assembly plant — it’s an anchor that pulls dozens of Korean tier-one and tier-two suppliers with it,” Chun said. “Battery makers, steel processors, logistics operators — they all follow because the finished product must be locally produced to be cost-competitive under the current trade regime. That’s a fundamentally different investment model from anything we saw in previous cycles.”

Gradiant Technology Park, an 860-acre industrial complex in Taylor, Texas [CUSHMAN & WAKEFIELD KOREA]

Cushman & Wakefield Korea also serves as the Korean-side marketing agent for iMarket Korea’s Gradiant Technology Park, a 212-acre industrial complex in Taylor, Texas, built specifically to house semiconductor-related companies within Samsung Electronics’ broader supply chain ecosystem. The team handles outreach to midsize Korean suppliers as prospective tenants, and Chun points to the Taylor cluster as a textbook example of how a single anchor investment organically generates a manufacturing hub around it.

When evaluating potential sites, Chun identifies three standards Korean companies must work through. Infrastructure comes first. For semiconductor fabs, power availability alone can eliminate a location before any other factor is considered, with water supply and logistics access close behind. Work force comes second, and the threshold goes beyond raw labor availability. Companies need to evaluate not just the existing talent pool but the surrounding training infrastructure — community colleges, vocational programs and university partnerships — that will sustain it over the facility’s lifetime. The third and increasingly decisive factor is ecosystem density. Korean companies want to operate within a cluster rather than in isolation, and sites that already carry gravitational pull, with suppliers nearby and customers accessible, hold a structural advantage over those that don’t.

Yet despite the pace of expansion, Chun flags a persistent organizational blind spot: Most Korean companies still enter overseas markets in silos, with different internal teams pursuing the same project on parallel tracks without coordination. External advisers tend to be brought in late to execute a decision already made, rather than to help shape it from the start.

“Create a single cross-functional team — whether housed in a property strategy unit, corporate strategy office or planning and coordination division — that owns the entire overseas expansion life cycle,” Chun said. “The companies that continue to operate in silos will still expand. But they’ll do it more slowly, more expensively and with more friction than the market demands. In a competitive environment where speed and precision matter, that organizational gap becomes a liability.”