After more than 7 years in Korea it is now time for my family and me to move on. I like to use the opportunity to thank all friends, customers, distributors, colleagues and other people we got to know during this time for their support and companionship. We only planned to stay for three years, but we stayed much longer.
We got to know and to cherish Korea, Koreans and their lifestyle. I learned in the years in Korea more than at any time before about cultural differences and similarities. Korea remains an important piece in our life.
For me the time here was one sixth of my life and one third of my adult life, for my youngest daughter it was home, as she had all her birthdays from the first to the eighth in this country.
This in itself shows that Korea will remain an important part in our lives.
In retrospect, the time in Korea was packed with lot of events. I took over the leadership of the cutting & welding division of Hoechst and prepared our start as the independent company Messer Griesheim Korea in Busan, which still continues to exist as a welding & cutting company.
Then we started with the gas business for Messer in Korea from nothing. In joint efforts by our colleagues and distributors in cooperation with our customers we introduced Messer Gas to Korea and developed our sales from zero to around 13 Bil. Won and were a profitable operation.
We moved our gas division out of Messer Griesheim Korea into Messer Korea, when we took over the majority of former Airplus in Incheon and we started successfully the Helium Joint Venture Messer MS Gas.
I look back with proud on a successful time in Korea. Here we went together with the Korean people through the Asian economic crisis through very bad and through good times.
Unfortunately, Messer was worldwide not that successful and their investment in their worldwide expansion added a high debt burden on the group.
After ownership change in the Messer group the new owners decided on a change in business policy and to concentrate on Europe and North America only and to sell the operations on the other continents in order to reduce the debts. Messer Korea belonged to the first companies Messer managed to sell.
Im proud of our achievements in the last seven years, but Im very sad about what happened to company and the way my time in Korea came to an end and that many of the colleagues had to find new jobs.
As of June 30th I have left the Messer group and moved on to Brisbane, Australia. I plan to start here my own trading business in specialty gas and gas equipment.
Also with Korea I will remain connected and hope to visit regularly again to this country. Due to private reasons our move from Korea to Australia was very sudden and I did not have the time to say personally good-bye to everybody.
But I will be back as a visitor and hope to see many of you again during those visits.
Take care and see you again!
Heinrich Grunefeld
heinrich_grunefeld@alumni.uwaterloo.ca