South Korea is a highly developed country and a global leader in many technology and innovation-driven fields.
The European Union and South Korea are important trade partners and they have entered a free trade agreement which came into effect at end of 2011. This was the EU's first trade deal with an Asian country, which eliminates duties for goods and liberalizes trade in services in addition to establishing cooperation on electronic commerce. South Korea is the EU's 8th largest export destination, while the EU is South Korea's 4th export destination.
The EU and South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT, signed a Joint Declaration for collaboration on ICT with focus on 5G in 2014. The joint declaration also foresees bilateral co-operation and exchanges between governments, research institutes, educational institutions, private companies, and other organizations. To that effect, a Korea-EU ICT working group was set up to prepare for ICT R&D cooperation as well as relevant policy discussions in the areas of 5G, Cloud and Internet of Things (IoT). This was the first joint declaration of cooperation in ICT between the EU and a country in Asia, followed by Japan in 2015.
There is strong collaboration between the EU and South Korea in the area of research and innovation, as the Scientific and Technological Cooperation agreement has been in place since 2007, leading to the celebration of the 10 years of EU - Korea research and innovation cooperation where both partners strongly encouraged an extended range of topics such as 5G technologies and automated driving systems.
Regarding standardisation for ICT, the leading bodies in South Korea and Europe, respectively TTA and ETSI, have a longstanding partnership which is demonstrated in the joint participation in the global partnership projects 3GPP and oneM2M as well as further collaboration in other areas of common interest. InDiCo will build on this existing collaboration and encourage its development as well as the establishment of new tracks for collaboration with other South Korean bodies, in particular in the field of Intelligent Transport Systems.
