SEOUL: Lee Jeung-hwan reads a movie script once a week and holds a series of meetings with his colleagues and film industry officials to decide whether to chip in for its production. At first glance, the 51-year-old man seems to be a typical investor at Chungmuro, the South Korean equivalent of Hollywood. But he is a banker who handles financing for filmmakers at South Korea’s state-run Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK).
Lee’s Creative Content Financing Department is praised for having generated huge profits for the bank by investing in mega-hit movies over the past few years. “The first thing I check every morning is the audience numbers of movies and the number of theaters showing the movies that we’ve invested in,” Lee said in a recent interview with Yonhap News Agency in his office filled with stacks of movie and drama scripts as well as DVDs and books.
Lee, chief of the 13-member team, said his team frequently holds meetings to decide whether to chip in for the production of new movies. As seen in IBK’s case, local banks are increasingly tapping into cultural content — which has emerged as a promising source of growth in recent years — as they have been struggling to find new growth drivers amid record-low rates and fiercer competition at home.
Banks’ investments in cultural products can provide much-needed help to the culture industry that has long been beset by a lack of funds at a time when South Korea is boosting the culture industry as a key growth engine for the future.
K-pop and its broader Korean Wave have struck a chord with young people around the world in recent years, burnishing South Korea’s image as a trendsetting country home to “Gangnam Style,” South Korean rapper Psy’s mega-hit song. Lee said he has been looking at three movie scripts since mid-July when he was named to lead the department handling creative content financing after a three-and-a-half year stint in Myanmar.
