Wonsan Investment Seminar

The Wonsan Investment Seminar has gone ahead after a bit of springtime dithering. There were rumors of this last fall, then ebola "struck" and this compressed planning. In late March, the Wonsan folks couldn't even offer firm dates for a seminar "sometime near the end of May".

This left us to wonder (aloud): "Who would be able to attend an event that requires travel to North Korea with such short notice?"

The answer, it seems, is about 150 people.

Micheal Spavor, a consultant who recently founded Paekdu Cultural Exchange, is on the trip and seems to be having a good time. Check out his twitter feed for the odd update.

We wanted to go and see how Wonsan's plans are shaping up, but everyone on the CE team already had travel commitments for end of May. It was somewhat reminiscent of the Rason Trade fair in 2013, to which we were invited with three weeks to spare.

One of the things that will have to change - people need more heads up for travel time.

That said, one of the takeaways we try to get our North Korean audiences to, um...take away is just how fast the business world moves these days - the expectation is that texts, emails, phone calls will all get near instant responses in today's wired world. (We're still saying 'wired', right?)

And now we're complaining that they're not going slow enough for us to plan. Oh well.