Businesses of South Korea and the United Arab Emirates(UAE) have agreed to strengthen bilateral investment and cooperation on the occasion of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s state visit to South Korea. 

About 200 government officials and business leaders from the two nations attended on Tuesday the Korea-UAE Business Investment Forum jointly held by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and the UAE economy ministry at a hotel in central Seoul. 

The participants included South Korea’s trade minister Cheong In-kyo and UAE Minister of State for Foreign Trade Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi. 

At the forum, South Korean biopharmaceutical company Medytox signed a letter of intent(LOI) with the UAE’s state-run Tecom Group to build a biopharmaceutical production facility in Dubai. The LOI comes a year after the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding(MOU)  during President Yoon Suk Yeol’s visit to the UAE in January last year. 

Yoon and Al Nahyan, who arrived in Seoul on Tuesday, are scheduled to hold summit talks at the presidential office in Yongsan on Wednesday.

In his welcoming remarks, Cheong said that bilateral trade between the countries reached 20-point-eight billion dollars in 2023, increasing more than 100 times from under 200 million dollars in 1980, attributing the rise to the efforts of the businesspeople from the two nations.  

Cheong said the government will do its utmost to ensure that the seeds of cooperation planted at the forum by the businesses from the two nations grow and bear fruit.