“It wasn’t hard to guess what the reaction of the company’s creditors would be if a president, who has only been in office for two months, were to say that there was a need to give the employees a pay raise. But that was exactly what I needed to do and fast.
I finally got their approval.”
Hyundai Corporation President & CEO Mark Juhn posted a long letter on the company’s intranet bulletin board on the second anniversary of his appointment as CEO.
The letter touched many employees as it gave a glimpse of what kind of difficulties and distress CEO Juhn had to go through as the CEO of a workout company.
He described the corporate atmosphere on his first day of office as “cold as winter wind coming through the window.”
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He opened up to his employees by saying, “Our company, which was much accustomed to carrying out export services for the entire Hyundai Group, was in an even weaker state than I had imagined.
I had to make people realize that our company was now nothing more than one of many business partners of (past) Hyundai Group subsidiaries.”
He particularly remembered November 29, 2004 as the day the company opened a new chapter in its history. This was when it reached a contract for a shipyard business in Qingdao, China, in order to secure long-term sources of revenue.
CEO Juhn explained, “When a potential joint venture partner in Korea suddenly changed its mind, I had to persuade the creditors that our company needed to make inroads into the relevant market alone by pointing out our company’s 30-year experience in winning overseas shipbuilding contracts.
The company succeeded in reaching a contract for 28 vessels only six months after officially launching the business.” He ended his letter with words of encouragement to his employees, saying, “Our company is steadily transforming itself into a sound general trading firm with strong, long-term sources of revenue.”
