Conquering the Hanwoo Market?
"Ughhh..."
It was a weekend morning. There was no real need to get up early, but she'd gone to bed early the night before, and so she woke early anyway. Bora, Haru, and Maru were all off for the weekend. The only one left was a staffer she wasn't particularly close to. Hana dragged her slippers across the floor and shuffled outside.
She went down to the first floor, dealt with breakfast in a hurry, and came back up to her room. With her stomach comfortably full, there was somewhere she needed to be today. She considered taking a staffer's car, then decided to go alone.
Dressed in something simple, she headed out of the building. The guards couldn't stop her. She was a master of the art of vanishing, and slipping away without a sound was a realm she'd long since transcended. Their patrol routes were already drawn clear as day in her head, and moving buildings seemed to have loosened security on top of that.
Didn't little kids from other families go out and play by themselves all the time? No parent was going to stop something like that. Her case was no different.
"Hm-hm~"
Humming to herself, she stepped out of the building. Today's destination was the farm she'd been building. They had moved the building, but they hadn't been able to move the fields. The plants she'd raised with her own sweat and tears were still waiting at the research institute.
She couldn't abandon her children. That was why she'd resolved to set aside at least one day each weekend for the farm. Tossing aside plants she'd been raising would be an unforgivable sin. She felt the same duty a parent feels toward their own child.
In her heart she wanted to simply move them here, but sadly there was nowhere in the city where crops could grow. Downtown was a forest of buildings, not land fit for farming. The price of the ground alone made it impossible; securing farmland here would cost a staggering fortune.
This was the middle of Seoul, after all.
She went out to the roadside to flag a taxi. The fare would add up, but she had a card with no limit. Taxis, however, came with one fatal flaw.
"We don't go out there, kid~"
"Catch another taxi."
Every last one of them refused to go where the institute was. It was probably too far out in the sticks. With no other choice, she decided to take the bus. Which bus hardly mattered.
Search for directions on a portal, enter your start and your destination, and it kindly told you exactly which bus to take. She typed it into her phone, and the site laid it all out for her, polite as could be.
"Oho!"
Truly, the cellphone was humanity's most revolutionary invention. If someone told her to go back to an age without one, she absolutely would not. A life without a phone was beyond imagining.
She walked in the direction of the bus stop. She wouldn't even need many transfers to get there. With directions this kind, getting lost would be the strange part.
"Ughhh..."
She was walking along a main road. The bus stop that was supposedly five minutes away was nowhere in sight—not so much as the tip of its nose. She was absolutely not bad with directions. The phone was the one that was wrong. She searched for that bus stop with everything she had. The fault lay with the stop, for failing to show itself.
Thirty minutes of walking later, she had ended up somewhere strange. She glanced around and around, on the verge of tears. There was nothing for it. She lifted her phone; she had no choice but to call Maru. If it was Maru, she would come running in a single stride. Hana believed that.
Even on her day off, Maru answered the moment the message arrived. Hana felt guilty. Calling her over something this personal on a day off—Maru surely wouldn't like it. But there was nothing else she could do.
And so her brief little adventure came to an end. Not a happy ending, mind you.
The ranch was built. Now they had to buy the cattle. A ranch by itself couldn't accomplish a thing.
Kim Sehee had grasped only the broad outline. Everything else, the staff beneath her handled on their own. Meddle in every little detail, and you could easily end up with nothing at all.
Her instruction was simple: this year, focus on increasing the number of head. At her word, a new department was created to oversee livestock, and beneath it sub-departments spread like a spider's web. They would have to sell an enormous quantity of cattle from here on, so the growth was inevitable.
The departments in charge of purchasing cattle were the busiest of all. They traveled the length of the country.
With Kim Sehee's order given, her subordinates had only to obey. Pay over the asking price, and there wouldn't be a soul who refused to sell.
The staff crisscrossed the nation, in and out of cattle barns.
"You're buying cattle?"
"Yes. Bull or cow, it doesn't matter. Every animal you're shipping this year, Starlight Food will purchase."
"Starlight Food? I've never heard of them getting into livestock."
The middle-aged man studied the Starlight Food employee with open doubt. Starlight Food was a famous company, true enough, but its fame was in food, not ranching—he knew that much. He himself was a regular who enjoyed the grapes they produced.
"I can't go into the details, but we intend to enter the market only so far as it doesn't damage the domestic one. We're thinking mainly of overseas markets."
"That so? Doesn't matter to me whether what you're saying is true or not. If Starlight Food is buying cattle at a good price, I've got no reason not to sell. Let's sign."
The ranch owner was planning to quit the business soon anyway, so he hardly cared whether Starlight Food pushed into the domestic hanwoo market or not. His retirement money was already set aside. And even if Starlight Food did enter the beef business, he figured the scale wouldn't amount to much. Beef simply didn't offer the kind of margins a corporation wanted to bother with. Starlight Food would profit more by focusing on the plants that were already doing so well.
In any case, Starlight Food's people roamed the country and bought cattle wherever they found them, bull or cow, without distinction. Word has no feet and still travels a thousand miles; the nation's ranchers had no choice but to learn that Starlight Food was moving into beef.
They did not welcome it. For the moment the company was paying high prices, so the short term was pure gain. But the rumors spread.
"I hear the cattle Starlight Food has bought already number in the thousands?"
"What? They bought that many?"
"From what I heard, it's over ten thousand. And they're still buying like mad, without stopping."
There were three million head of hanwoo in the country. What Starlight Food had purchased wasn't even one percent of that. Even so, the ranchers could only be stunned.
"Buying that many... do they even have a ranch to raise them on?"
"They built a huge one in Gangwon Province, I hear. Big enough for several hundred thousand head, from what people are saying."
"Is Starlight Food planning to take over our hanwoo market?"
Cattle ranching was not as profitable a business as one might think. A deal the government had once struck with the United States forced domestic producers to compete with imported beef, and rising feed costs were a problem all their own. Just as the cost of living climbed, the price of cattle feed had been surging sharply year after year.
"Things were bleak enough already..."
"Won't the government step in?"
The more cattle there were, the only ones who benefited were consumers. For sellers, it was like being struck by lightning. Anyone who remembered the supply and demand taught in economics could see it plainly.
The more hanwoo increased, the more prices had to fall. It was the same as manufactured goods: the more you produced, the lower the cost of production. Hanwoo was no exception.
And if prices collapsed, hanwoo farms across the country would take a devastating hit. The government did step in to manage herd sizes, but no one knew what Starlight Food would do. Put bluntly, couldn't they sweep the farms aside the way they had the grape growers, and dominate the market all by themselves?
The hanwoo farms trembled at Starlight Food's arrival. Even so, they didn't band together. Most of them were selling their cattle to the company through the back door. When someone offered a premium over the usual price, refusing would have been the strange thing.
And so, over Korea's hanwoo market, a tremendous typhoon by the name of Starlight Food was slowly beginning to rise.