The global spread of COVID-19 continues to shock the manufacturing industry. In the first half of this year, all industrial production has continued to decline. As of May, the average operating rate of the manufacturing industry was 63.6%, down 4.6 percentage points from the previous month, and the lowest level in 11 years and 4 months since January of last year (62.8%). The inventory ratio also reached 128.6%, the highest in 21 years and 9 months since the International Monetary Fund (IMF) foreign exchange crisis. Fortunately, the economy showed a rebound in the third quarter when the spread of the coronavirus slowed down, but as COVID-19 entered the third pandemic starting in December, there is a high possibility that such a crisis could come at any time.

In Korea, the manufacturing sector has a huge impact on the national economy, with the manufacturing sector accounting for approximately 30% of nominal GDP. Therefore, in order to improve the competitiveness of the manufacturing industry and prevent economic recession in the post-corona era, it is necessary to establish a systematic plan for the expansion of the manufacturing industry's digital transformation infrastructure and make preemptive investments.

The Digital New Deal can serve as an essential element in Korea's fundamental improvement and innovation of the manufacturing industry based on DNA (Data, Network, AI). In order to make digital-based production more intelligent and flexible, manufacturing innovation based on data must be achieved. However, it is difficult for small and medium-sized manufacturing companies to accumulate data and analyze AI because it is difficult to equip data collection, storage, and analysis equipment in reality. In order to overcome this, providing a cloud platform specialized in manufacturing AI at the national level to provide benefits to the majority of small and medium-sized enterprises that lack manpower and platform infrastructure will be of great help in strengthening the competitiveness of the manufacturing industry on a national level.

I am very happy to hear that a small and medium-sized venture company is carrying out a project to build a manufacturing-specialized, artificial intelligence (AI) and data-based platform (Korea AI Manufacturing Platform (KAMP)). KAMP aims to provide know-how in acquiring and processing learning data and provide AI technology for small and medium-sized businesses without experience in data collection and processing. Compared to foreign cloud AI solutions, the launch of a national platform is expected to be of great help to small and medium-sized businesses as it can not only adapt to the characteristics and shortcomings of the domestic manufacturing industry in advance, but also reduce costs.

In addition, in the domestic cloud platform market, global big tech companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft already dominate the development and distribution fields, but the position of domestic AI cloud solutions such as Naver Business Platform, Samsung SDS Cloud, and Douzone Bizon is limited. It is expected that growing size will also have an advantage in improving the competitiveness of domestic small and medium-sized businesses.

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups is currently conducting an AI verification support project to apply AI technology on a pilot basis. The success of this support project for manufacturing sites will be a great help to small and medium-sized businesses with poor data processing and AI technologies. We hope that many successful cases will be developed and that this will be of great help in improving the digital transformation and manufacturing competitiveness of small and medium-sized businesses.