K-Railway’s flight and responsible management: Map to a sustainable future drawn by Hyundai Rotem > News

The core of the ‘2026 Rail Solution Win-Win Cooperation Conference’ announced by Hyundai Rotem is improving the qualitative structure of the railway ecosystem. They made a bold decision to more than double the size of the shared growth fund from KRW 70 billion to KRW 150 billion to relieve the burden of high interest rates on partners. Rather than simply providing financial support, we have partnered with Shinhan Bank and the Export-Import Bank to provide trade finance and preferential interest rates, thereby opening a practical path for our partners to settle into overseas markets. In addition, the company showed its will to dramatically strengthen the basic strength of the domestic technology ecosystem by nearly tripling the annual research and development (R&D) investment cost from 28 billion won to 86 billion won. This can be interpreted as a result of CEO Lee Yong-bae's philosophy that K-Railway's global competitiveness is reflected in the sweat of partners put into each and every component.

Technological innovation and talent development are also central pillars of this strategy. Hyundai Rotem is also taking the lead in technology protection by providing free security consulting to small and medium-sized partners who have difficulty establishing their own security systems. In addition, we are disseminating the digital transformation capabilities required in rapidly changing industrial sites by providing field-tailored job training, such as the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and work automation, to more than 6,500 employees of partner companies through specialized technical training centers this year alone. These efforts became the foundation for successful localization and technological cooperation in the electric train project in Queensland, Australia, and the LA Metro project in the United States. Now, Hyundai Rotem and its partners are going beyond a simple superiority relationship and are solidifying their position as a true ‘community of destiny’ running together in the global market.

The management’s unconventional actions are also attracting the market’s attention. The purchase of a total of 1.6 billion won worth of treasury stock by 37 executives, including CEO Lee Yong-bae, is a symbolic event of responsible management carried out at the company level for the first time in 10 years since 2016. If past share purchases were intended to protect the stock price due to poor performance, this purchase is more in the nature of declaring to the market the company's confidence in future growth and its commitment to responsible management. In fact, Hyundai Rotem received a record-breaking report card last year, exceeding 1 trillion won in operating profit for the first time since its founding. Since K2 tank exports got back on track in 2023, sales and operating profits have been recording explosive growth every year, and the company's future value is shining brighter than ever, with the order backlog approaching 30 trillion won as of the first quarter of this year.

Hyundai Rotem's gaze is now moving beyond the ground to space and the future battlefield. We plan to make a large-scale investment of more than 1.8 trillion won by 2028 to expand our territory beyond the defense industry and railroads into the robotics and aerospace fields. In particular, manned and unmanned complex weapon systems and unmanned robot technology that introduce physical artificial intelligence (AI) technology are expected to become a key driving force that will change the game of future battlefields. In addition, we are securing next-generation leadership in the aerospace field by developing methane engines for reusable space launch vehicles in preparation for the private-led ‘New Space’ era. In this way, Hyundai Rotem's preemptive strategy of boldly betting on new future growth engines based on the solid profits of its existing main businesses provides a model answer for how companies should achieve sustainable growth.