Tak-hyeon Lee had been shaken for a long moment. He gathered himself, and at last he managed to speak.

"All right. I can hardly refuse to hear your reasons, can I?"

His mind was in turmoil, and he meant to settle it by listening first.

So he started with a question for Seong-ho Kim.

"Explain what you want to do. In detail."

Seong-ho began calmly. What he was about to describe, he had already lived through in his past life.

"What I want to do is develop and manufacture biopharmaceuticals on contract. A drug company develops a new medicine, and we mass-produce it to their recipe and bring it to the world."

"You really do love subcontracting, don't you?"

Listening had steadied Tak-hyeon, and his voice came out sour.

"Isn't one of the things you're sinking an astronomical sum into at Ilhyeon Electronics right now just taking on other people's subcontracting?"

"You mean the foundry?"

"That's right."

Tak-hyeon jabbed a finger at him. That was the one. He kept going.

"But there, at least, we can make our own chips. We'd build what we need anyway with our own hands and rent out the empty capacity to other companies… Fine. Looked at that way, it's worth thinking about. But this isn't the same, is it? We don't have a thing of our own in this. Why would we go picking grains of rice up off the ground, where somebody else threw them, and eat them?"

His voice had turned harsh.

But Seong-ho didn't flinch.

"Let me explain why I want to do contract development and manufacturing — CDMO, in other words. First of all, I don't need to tell you that the bio industry keeps growing and expanding, or that it's a promising one."

"Ever since the First Emperor of Qin went searching for the herb of immortality, living forever has been what every man wants. No industry gets people spending as freely as the one that keeps them healthy and alive longer."

"Exactly. And as living standards rise — Europe and North America first, and now Asia too —…