Transformácia a krízový manažment ako dva prístupy k reforme podnikovej sféry. Príklad podnikov oceliarskeho priemyslu v SR a v Kóreji
TRANSFORMATION AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT AS TWO APPROACHES TO CORPORATE REFORM An example of steel industry companies

Summary/Abstract: Restructuring of steel firms is a difficult task with respect to their size, capital re-quirements and often-existing state support for their activity. The steel industry is a specific capital intensive industry where restructuring is needed due to the over-capacity of production, increasing worldwide competition, strictness of ecological norms and growing customers needs. Besides this, in the analyzed period dynamic growth of steel product prices and financial crisis have been evidenced, contributing to already needed and expected changes. However, the paper does not cover technological aspects of the industry but focuses on restructuring and the role of state in this process. It describes economic and political issues related to the restructuring of large-scale enterprises in steel industry comparing situation in the Slovak republic and Republic of Korea. Its aim is to find whether some similarities and differences in corporate reforms in the two countries exist. Despite different size of their steel production capacities and size of main corporate players, the two countries had been forced to make similar necessary changes in their corporate structures to make their firms more competitive. Using as example the biggest steel-producers in each country (VSŽ Košice and POSCO), the paper presents some common problems in historical perspective, institutional weak-nesses affecting the companies and structural problems in the industry. Company com-parison includes also basic statistical data but absent is detailed analysis of ownership, organization and technological issues. It is shown that the companies have common features due to similarities in environments where they operate but that there are also differences. Whereas as a factor forcing country to changes was in the Slovak case poorly functioning model of centrally planned economy, in the Korean case it was a weak system of bank lending, corporate governance and control and state interventions followed by financial crisis. Corporate sphere reforms belong to the difficult elements of reform programs because they are sensitive to the sequencing of steps and to the quality of institutional framework. The process of ownership changes was accompanied by institutional changes. Also business actors whose number, knowledge and degree of cooperation had changed over time had affected these changes. Despite the countries´ high economic status, during late 1990s they faced the problem how to increase com-petitiveness of their large-scale enterprises. As a consequence of the problems, both countries have decided to start improve corporate governance system. In the paper a short reference is given also to the theoretical background for regulation and corporate reforms. Some „similarity content“ hypotheses, based on estimation of institutional and re-form characteristics of both countries, have been evaluated. Four levels of similarities have been analyzed with focus on national and corporate dimensions.

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