Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Mong-koo looks at the inside of a car being produced at a production line at Kia Motors’ European plant in Zilina, Slovakia in which he made an inspection tour. (Photo: Hyundai Motor Group)

Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Mong-koo will be the first Korean to be inducted into the prestigious U.S. Automotive Hall of Fame, Hyundai Motor Group said on Feb. 7.

The U.S. Automotive Hall of Fame was established in 1939. It selects and inducts persons who have played pivotal roles and contributed to the global automobile industry and mobility, based on historic outcomes and the performance of the global automobile industry.

The U.S. Automotive Hall of Fame is the most prestigious award of the global automobile industry.

Among the inductees into the U.S. Automotive Hall of Fame are representative figures of the global automobile industry, including Henry Ford in 1967, Thomas Edison in 1969, Carl Benz in 1984, Soichiro Honda in 1989, and Kiichiro Toyota in 2018.

Chairman Chung will be one of 2020’s inductees at an induction & awards ceremony, to be held in Detroit, Mich., at the MGM Grand Hotel on July 23, he is expected to stand shoulder to shoulder with legendary figures of the global automobile industry.

The U.S. Automotive Hall of Fame said Chairman Chung is a business leader who has catapulted Hyundai Motor Group to success and he is evaluated to rank shoulder to shoulder with many legendary figures as Kia Motors has been put on a track on top of the expanding of global production centers and establishment of high-efficiency business structure.

Earlier, Chairman Chung received the “Automobile Industry Contribution Award” from the U.S. Automotive Hall of Fame, the Top Management Award from Business Week in 2004, and Asia’s best CEO award in the automobile category from Automotive News in 2005, the James A. Van Fleet Award from U.S. Korea Society in 2009, and the global 100 best managers’ award from Harvard Business Review in 2012. Chairman Chung is one of Korea’s representative business leaders.

He is evaluated to have advanced the development of the Korean economy and automobile industry. Chairman Chung has been credited with acquiring Kia Motors, which had been reeling from the 1997 Asian financial crisis, putting the automaker on a track and making it a global automaker as well as catapulting Hyundai Motor& Kia Motors to global top 5 automaker as of 2010.

Chairman Chung has demonstrated his reserved strength by expanding business presence abroad in pursuit of market share. Under his stewardship, Hyundai Motor Group has logged unprecedented growth among global automakers by building local production centers in major global areas.

Chairman Chung’s high-stakes challenges are evaluated to have reshaped the global automobile industry and Korean economy landscape.

Quality management being one of his management tenets, Chung has stressed that quality is the ultimate value. He established a standard plant construction system to build high-quality plants in a timely and uniform fashion all over the world.

Chung also set up the world’s largest R&D center to secure a corporate and intrinsic competitive edge. Chung has been praised for spurring the global growth of cooperative companies through innovation of parts supply chain.

Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors’ joint overseas market entry with Korean parts makers in the course of the construction of overseas plants was the outcomes of the manifestation of Chairman Chung’s determination to promote shared growth.

He is evaluated to have established a virtuous cycle of the Korean automobile ecosystem to expand the competitiveness of Korean automotive parts makers.

Chung has also been praised for constructing Hyundai Steel’s integrated steelworks, producing crude steel, the gem of the industry, leading a take-off in the Korean materials industry.

Chung is also rated for having suggested a new paradigm of responsibility and sustainable management toward the environment by having the integrated steel mill maxing out groupwide synergetic effects and establishing the world’s first recycling resources business structure.