TEHRAN: The economic outcome of President Park Geun-hye’s landmark state visit to Iran is expected to be worth $45.6 billion, the highest ever from a single summit, according to Cheong Wa Dae on Monday.
Involving 66 memorandums of understanding, 30 nation-scale projects and a state-backed financial program worth $25 billion, as well as the largest-ever economic delegation, South Korea is hoping to gain a foothold in the promising Iranian market and eventually lead to a second Middle East boom. “This summit will act as an opportunity to take a preemptive step into the Iranian market, which is considered a key axis of the incoming second Middle East boom,” An Chong-bum, senior presidential secretary for economic affairs, told reporters Monday.
President Park met with Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani in a historic bilateral summit at Tehran’s Saa’dat abad Palace, the first of the kind to be held since the two countries established diplomatic relations back in 1962. Her visit came some three months after the U.N. lifted its years-long sanctions on Iran in January in recognition of the latter’s consent to a restricted nuclear program.
“As a result of the summit, it is possible for the bilateral trade volume to bounce back to the pre-sanction levels,” the presidential secretary said. The South Korea-Iran trade volume, which stood at $17.4 billion in 2011, plummeted by 65 percent to a $6.1 billion as of end-2015.
Shoring up the government’s economic achievement were a series of massive infrastructure and energy deals, which came in line with South Korea’s struggle to boost its stalled outbound trade as well as Iran’s blueprint to rebuild its economy after years of economic isolation.
