Late last year the news that a Korean-led consortium had won a major order for a nuclear power project in Abu Dhabi brought further gloom to an already downbeat Japan. The Japanese media noted that South Korea’s President Lee Myung-bak had visited Abu Dhabi repeatedly in support of the Korean bid and suggested that the Japanese government did not have an adequate setup to back Japan’s bid. A senior official at the Ministry for Economy, Trade, and Industry offered this postmortem: “This is a defeat for the Japanese business model. Japan was trying to sell Abu Dhabi nuclear power plants. But Korea was offering to provide a steady supply of electricity for sixty years. The Koreans were selling electricity.” The South Korean government and the company leading the bid shared the same objective and conducted repeated top-level sales in order to achieve it. They ... ... [Read more]