Business Is Business (1)
The partnership with AMKO was handled in thoroughly American fashion.
A great deal of money was going in, and there was no certainty it would ever come back out of Korea, so Roberts was taking every precaution. Ki-jo did not take it personally. A personal bond was one thing, and business was another.
He haunted the USIS, trading telexes with Roberts until the contract took shape. AMKO would assume full responsibility for the coal mine's conveyor system and for the cement plant equipment. Korea had no manufacturing base of its own, so there was no other way. The conveyor installation and the kiln for firing limestone would be purchased in Japan.
That, in turn, shoved the equity split decisively in AMKO's favor. AMKO and Cheongsan would divide the company seven to three. It was less a partnership than Cheongsan buying a minority stake. Ki-jo tried every way he could to drag the ratio to six-to-four, but even if he shook out every last won he had earned, it was impossible.
He did, however, have an ace up his sleeve: mining rights. Scarred by the colonial years, the Korean government had no intention of handing mining rights to a foreign company. They were among the few assets a poor government still possessed. The rights, then, had to be bought by Ki-jo. His stake was only three parts in ten, but the mining rights let his influence stand nearly equal to AMKO's. Roberts accepted it as unavoidable.
In return, Ki-jo found a way for Roberts to carry his profits safely back to America. If they sold coal and cement, changed the proceeds into dollars, and tried to remit them, a Korean government already starved for dollars would never grant permission. So Ki-jo asked the government to let them buy tungsten with the profits and ship the ore to the United States. An American firm was building them a cement plant and even installing conveyors in the mines—surely it could allow that much. In the end he secured a special exemption: minerals purchased with won earned in Korea could be sent to America.
With that, Roberts's second investment in Korea was all but complete. All that remained was for Hee-jun to come back and sign.
Frank, who had been watching the telexes pass between Ki-jo and Roberts, asked a question.
"Ever eaten a McDonald's hamburger?"
"No."
"Then how did you talk a man like Roberts into putting money into a company called McDonald's? You've never even been to America, Mr. Lee."
A sharp, inconvenient question. Very CIA. This was a moment that called for a lie. Ki-jo told him what he had written in the letter to Roberts.
"Frank, you know paper cups?"
"Sure. Everybody uses them these days. That's what they pour your cola into at a hamburger joint."
"That's it, exactly. An acquaintance of a Japanese friend of mine works at a paper cup plant in California."
"Hmm."
Frank turned the information over with a professional's habit. In the 1950s most Asians living in America were low-wage laborers, so the story held together.
"He noticed that one of the buyers taking cups from his plant was using far more than the rest."
"And that was the hamburger place called McDonald's?"
"Yes. They were going through five times as many paper cups as other customers. Sometimes ten."
"Business must have been that good."
"He went there himself and tried one. A fifteen-cent hamburger came out the moment he ordered it, and it tasted extraordinary."
"Hm. So you picked the shop that was going to make it by counting paper cups."
"Something like that."
Frank bought the story.
"Oh, and I wasn't trying to read it, but the telex..."
"It's fine. If something else is bothering you, ask."
"Roberts said he was going to buy real estate around San Jose and Palo Alto. What's that about?"
Was Frank taking an interest in personal finance? A faint smile touched Ki-jo's mouth.
Rather than invest in semiconductor firms he did not understand, Roberts had decided to buy land in Palo Alto. If Ki-jo's prediction was right, advanced technology companies and their engineers would pour into the area, and land prices would rise of their own accord. Even if the prediction proved wrong, property in the San Jose area was unlikely to lose him much. It was a banker's idea through and through. Roberts was a Stillman, all right. Instead of putting money into the companies that would one day become Intel or AMD, he had made a deal to buy land in the district that would become the richest neighborhood of them all—Silicon Valley—and take a handsome profit.
Ki-jo did not lay any of that out. He kept it light.
"Frank, if you've got money set aside, buy land or a house out there. If I were an American, that's what I'd do."
Frank seemed to think it over for a moment, then nodded.
Ki-jo had a cup of tea with him and went back to the office.
Graphs of Miwon sales proceeds and the door-to-door saleswomen's results were pinned to the wall. Seong Dae-ik's work. Miwon revenue climbed steadily up and to the right, breaking its own record every day, and the Miwon Ladies' figures were rising in open competition. The fear that a saleswoman might simply walk off with the Miwon had been wiped clean. No one slaughters the goose that lays the golden eggs, and the door-to-door staff brought their proceeds in faithfully. Blinded though they might be by the cash in front of them, not one of them was fool enough to quit a job that settled money in their hands every day.
Ki-jo called Dae-ik in.
"Manager Seong."
"Yes, sir."
"Tally the results every quarter, and send the top five on a hot-spring trip."
"Understood."
Having given the order for a sales incentive, Ki-jo glanced at his wristwatch. The appointment was drawing near.
Ten minutes later a Mercedes turned into the alley and stopped in front of the office. Cho Choong-hoon.
"President Lee! Let's go!"
Choong-hoon called from inside the car. Before Ki-jo went to get in, he spoke to his four managers.
"I'm going over to Eighth Army headquarters. I think we'll have a transport contract today."
"Have a good trip, sir!"
The Cheongsan people came all the way out to the front of the Miwon wholesale office and saw him off as the Mercedes pulled away.
On the way to the Eighth Army base, Choong-hoon asked him a question.
"President Oh of Cheongsan Shipping isn't coming up to Seoul?"
Choong-hoon had come down to Busan to help Ki-jo, and he had formed a tie with Oh Yang-soo as well. As it turned out, Cho Choong-hoon and Oh Yang-soo were senior and junior from the seamen's training institute in Jinhae.
"He'll be busy just now, getting things ready for Korea Shipping and the tungsten exports. Two more freighters are due in from America."
"Wait a minute. You're telling me you've secured three ocean-going freighters?"
Choong-hoon clicked his tongue. He had graduated with top honors from the engineering department of the Jinhae institute and held a second-class engineer's certificate issued by the Japanese Ministry of Transport. In the colonial years he had worked at a shipyard in Kobe and sailed Japanese freighters on the Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asian routes. The reason he would later found Hanjin Shipping was that the sea was in his blood.
"Look, Ki-jo. I always thought that once I made some money I'd start a shipping company, and here you already have a proper one. I have to hand it to you."
"I bought two of those ships entirely on bank debt. I have to turn nearly every won of freight straight over to paying it back."
"There you go again, complaining on a full stomach. Introduce me to that bank that lent you the money for ships. I'd like about twenty. Ha ha ha."
They were still joking when they reached Eighth Army headquarters.
The American guards seemed used to Choong-hoon's Mercedes. They gave his base pass a perfunctory glance and examined only Ki-jo's with any care. Once they were through the main gate, Choong-hoon spoke.
"Ki-jo, from what I've been able to learn, word is this transport contract will be exclusive."
"Exclusive?"
As far as Ki-jo knew, Hanjin Trading's monopoly on U.S. military logistics had come in 1957. He had not expected the thing to arrive two years early.
"What's there to be surprised about? Isn't it all thanks to that beer haul of yours? The Americans saw Cheongsan's people risk their lives to protect the beer, and it changed their minds. They treated Koreans like thieves, and only now are they looking at us properly."
At the words exclusive transport contract, Ki-jo's heart kicked. Hanjin Trading's rise into the chaebol ranks had come from precisely that monopoly on U.S. military transport. Within two years of winning it, Hanjin opened an office in the Bando Hotel in Sogong-dong, a building where only companies on the rise could get a foothold.
Someone might ask what a corporate office was doing in a hotel, but the Bando, where Hee-jun had stayed, was a place apart. A hotel reserved for foreigners, where bureaucrats, politicians, and businessmen came and went and held quiet conversations about money. There was a reason people called the Bando Hotel the first address of the Korean economy.
In any case, if they signed an exclusive contract with the U.S. military now, by 1960 they could be earning 2.2 million dollars a year. In the original timeline, that was exactly what Cho Choong-hoon's Hanjin Trading had done.
Ki-jo could hardly believe Choong-hoon meant to share an opportunity that large with him. Had the man been greedy, he would have cut Ki-jo out and found some way to land the contract for Hanjin alone. The prime contractor on the beer haul had been Hanjin, not Cheongsan. By 1955 Hanjin, too, would expand its capital on the strength of its credit and become a firm of forty employees and thirty trucks. Set aside the half-truck Ki-jo owned, the one they called the Clunker, and the two companies would grow to nearly equal scale. It was just the season when he was beginning to make his name in the transport trade, reason enough to get greedy—and still Choong-hoon was keeping the promise of partnership.
Choong-hoon stopped the car in front of the Transportation Command, where the contract would be settled, cut the engine, and turned to him.
"Ki-jo, I don't know what you think of me, but I want to keep doing business with you."
He meant it. If Choong-hoon truly saw him as a partner, Ki-jo was willing to keep the partnership going. The man was trustworthy, a master of connections, the sort who knew everyone—a partner who could supply exactly what Ki-jo lacked.
"As I've said before, I'd rather grow with you, hyung, than compete against you."
"Thank you. I mean it. Let's make a real go of this. You know Lucky Chemical, the ones who make Lucky Cream?"
Lucky—the company that would become the LG and GS groups.
"I do."
"Lucky is a partnership between the Heos and the Koos. Let's do as well as they did."
"Good."
Inside the car, Ki-jo and Cho Choong-hoon clasped hands and held on.
They got out, straightened their backs, and walked into the transportation officer's office with a sure step.
The office was smaller than he had expected. In that cramped room a small major in glasses was waiting for them. The office, and the major, seemed strangely familiar. A black-and-white photograph rose in Ki-jo's mind: 1957, Cho Choong-hoon smiling brightly beside an American officer after a contract was signed. This place was very like that one. It might even have been the same room, and the same man.
"Good to see you, Major Mack."
"Good to see you, Mr. Cho."
McCulinski and Choong-hoon were already acquainted.
"Pleased to meet you. McCulinski. I've heard a great deal."
After greeting Ki-jo as well, McCulinski offered them the chairs set in front of his desk. It was hard to believe that a mere major, in an office this small, was presiding over a contract worth millions of dollars.
Once the two of them were seated, he began.
"As you know, the supply transport test through Incheon Port is finished. I called you both in today to settle a few points before the contract."
It was what they had expected. What mattered was whether the contract was exclusive or not. Ki-jo still believed that nothing was certain until the thing was signed, but Choong-hoon was different. As if the exclusive deal were already in his pocket, he spoke with an easy smile.
"Mack, quit circling. Give it to us straight. Is it an exclusive contract, or isn't it?"
At that, McCulinski answered.
"It is an exclusive contract."
"Then Hanjin–CS has won the exclusive."
At Choong-hoon's words, Major Mack gave a tilt of the head that was neither quite a nod nor quite a shake.
Something felt wrong. Exclusive, yes—but not exclusive to Hanjin–CS. Major McCulinski's face seemed to say exactly that.