Method Validation for Determination of Thallium by Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry and Monitoring of Various Foods in South Korea

Thallium (Tl) is a rare element and one of the most harmful metals. This study validated an analytical method for determining Tl in foods by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) based on food matrices and calories. For six representative foods, the method’s correlation coefficient (R2) was above 0.999, and the method limit of detection (MLOD) was 0.0070–0.0498 μg kg−1, with accuracy ranging from 82.06% to 119.81% and precision within 10%. We investigated 304 various foods in the South Korean market, including agricultural, fishery, livestock, and processed foods. Tl above the MLOD level was detected in 148 samples and was less than 10 μg kg−1 in 98% of the samples. Comparing the Tl concentrations among food groups revealed that fisheries and animal products had higher Tl contents than cereals and vegetables. Tl exposure via food intake did not exceed the health guidance level.

Export performance and competitiveness of Indonesian coconut oil and desiccated coconut

Competitiveness is an essential key in market penetration in export destination countries. This study aims to analyze Indonesian coconut oil, refined, bleached and deodorized and desiccated coconut (DC) export performance and its competitiveness in the export market. The competitiveness measurement is seen from comparative and competitive advantages over the two products in each leading export destination market. The analysis method used graphical illustrations and the RCA and EPD covering the period of 2009-2018. The study shows that coconut oil and DC’s export performance increases in all export markets during the analysis period. The Chinese market is a prospective market for coconut oil with the most significant export growth, 10.51% per year, and the largest market share after the USA and South Korea. Meanwhile, the Russian market is the biggest after Germany and Singapore for DC products. The result shows that coconut oil and DC product have comparative competitiveness in all export markets. Coconut oil products are no longer competitive in the South Korean market because their exports are not growing dynamically. The Chinese market is still open, but Indonesia cannot take advantage of this opportunity (lost opportunity). Meantime, DC products have an ideal position in the Russian market and the USA market for coconut oil, namely the rising star. Indonesia gains additional market share with dynamic growth (fast-growing product). Active efforts to find new markets through market diversification and diplomacy while maintaining existing markets can be an option to increase the export of coconut oil and desiccated product.

Supporting Cross-Border E-commerce of Micro Entrepreneurs in Developing Countries: Export Marketing Strategy

Cross-border e-commerce is an opportunity for micro, small and medium sized enterprise (MSMEs) in developing countries. Based on a resource-based approach, this research studied how to support resource lacking enterprises with export marketing strategy. It dealt with actual business cases of Mongolian entrepreneurs trying to export Mongolian products to Korean market. Multiple source data including interviews, internal documents, and group discussions, were matched with theories to come up with strategies and validated by supporting organizations in Mongolia and Korea. The research suggests that MSMEs should rely on third party digital platforms rather than setting up their own. For product strtategy of the marketing mix, sellecting competitive product categories and supporting them adjusting to foreign markets and quality assurance is needed. For price strategy, loccally high priced products should use a price penetration strategy with a lower price compared to competing foreign products. For place strategy, supporting organizations should partner with exporters for collective delivery. For promotion strategy, they need to support the capacity of MSMEs enabling them to use digital marketing tools effectivly. These strategies were validated and adopted by supporting organizations in Monglia and Korea.

Building an Operational Solution Assistant System for Foreign SMEs in ROK

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is an important resource that helps accelerate the development of the country’s economy, add substantial funding to growth and facilitate technology transfer. Republic of Korea (ROK) is one of the world’s developed countries with dynamic economy, advanced science and technology. In recent years, the Korean government has continuously formulated tax policies, policies to support the business economy and import policies to support foreign businesses in Korea. The Pangyo Valley Creative Economy Valley is being groomed as a global startup hub in Asia. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in foreign countries are increasingly interested and eager to seek investment opportunities in the Korean market. Nonetheless, for these companies, language barriers and cultural and institutional differences make it more difficult and time-consuming to learn about the Korean market (such as investment trends, laws, visa policies, taxes and business establishment issues in Korea, etc.). In this study, we explored the process of searching information and seeking investment opportunities and built a business consulting and support application in the first stages of starting a business in ROK to increase effectiveness and save time, which is also an innovative business practice in Use-case ROK. We designed our Virtual Assistant system that can crawl and analyze data on foreign investments in ROK from open data resource websites (data.co.kr) and used analytic and aggregation techniques to explore trends in investments of foreign enterprises. We also researched the process of searching information and seeking investment opportunities for SMEs when investing in ROK, government support policies, laws and taxes as well as a number of other related issues. We built datasets and used Natural Language Processing (NLP) together with Natural Language Understanding (NLU) algorithms to build chatbot applications. Friendly framework for new developers to add and build up the dataset of AI Assistant is built by providing input intent data function, input Entity data function, input utterance data function as well as training and test function. In addition, we built a web-app connected to the server to visualize all the results of research so that SMEs owners can easily use and look for information on investments. Based on the research results, we can make recommendations to SMEs in keeping with the changing investment trends in ROK.