While in Sweden, President Moon Jae-in is going to visit local businesses in the country... including Ericsson, one of the world's leading network equipment providers.
And ahead of the president's visit there,... our Oh Soo-young got to sit down with the CEO of a joint venture between Ericsson and Korea's IT giant LG Electronics.
South Korean and Swedish companies are the "perfect match" for business cooperation in the 5G network industry,... according to Hokan Cervell CEO of Ericsson-LG.
Speaking to Arirang News ahead of his meeting with President Moon Jae-in in Sweden on Friday,... Cervell said he says his company aims to expand its business presence in South Korea.
Ericsson-LG was launched as a joint venture in 2010 between the Swedish and South Korean IT giants.

"I think the reason why Korea is a very interesting market for us as Ericsson is that it's a very mature and advanced ICT market. It's also a market that is driven both by government and ICT companies who want to be first. And us being a technology leader, we want to work with a market that is really advanced and wants to be firs."

South Korea was the first country in the world to launch the 5G network for the average mobile user in early April.
The firm is working with South Korea's largest telecom networks to roll out 5G equipment around the country,... to overcome issues with connectivity and the insufficient coverage of base stations outside metropolitan areas.

"It's a new technology and when a new tech is introduced, it normally takes some time to tune and optimize that in real life and that's what we're seeing right now. The networks in Korea are getting more and more stable and are performing better and better and it's happening day by day. And I'm sure subscribers in Korea will soon be very happy with the performance of 5G."

South Korea announced a plan to create an 158 billion dollar 5G industry by the year 2026,... by spurring the development of gadgets and software that utilize the super-fast wireless network.

"As a matter of fact, this is one of the reasons I love to be in Korea. Korea from a gov't perspective and operative perspective. This is going to create a lot of revenue, 180 tril won over the next number of years, it's going to create new jobs 600-thousand jobs and it's going to be contributed to the export of Korea. So this fact will actually make it possible for Korean companies to take advantage of this -- to be more competitive, to be more efficient or to be more sustainable."

With President Moon's state visit to Sweden, what kind of opportunities do you see for business cooperation between the two countries?

"I think there is a perfect match between Korea and Sweden. ICT is of course an obvious area which is an industry that we represent as Ericsson-LG. It's also important to understand that ICT is something that will have impact on every single industry. It doesn't matter if it's transportation, health or utilities or whatever it may be. A company t