There's great economic uncertainty around the world, so why are you making such a large investment right now? Well, I personally don't think the investment is that large.

In fact, I think it's still not enough.

From my point of view, I don't think it's the peak of the K-content industry in Korea.

I think it's about getting over the hump.

So I can see the top of the mountain now, but there's still some way to go.

So now, I think we need to invest more money and effort and focus investments in developing people. Of course, the economy is not good globally, and the Korean government is also being more austere right now.

So we have been spending a lot of money on welfare and improving people's quality of life.

We know that we need to invest in culture, but we are cautious about it because it doesn't produce fast results.

So I think we invest a lot, but I still think it's not enough.

We need to do more. How are you strategizing to make sure that your investments are reaching small and medium-sized businesses?

Most of the time, the big global productions are being taken care of in the marketplace.

Even if we don't provide any government support, there are already a lot of financial institutions in the US or in other countries, including a lot of global funds, and also in Korea.

From our point of view, it's actually the small and medium-sized independent films that we need to invest in because they give us a lot of room for experimentation, including with manpower issues and other challenges that support the big film industry.

There's an invisible added value that comes out of it.

We can't see the economic effects right away, but those advantages can have ripple effects. How much is the growth of K-content helping the broader tourism industry?

We think it's having a significant impact on tourism because people are curious about Korea after watching dramas or movies, performances by our K-pop idols, or other things like our webtoons or games.

And I think people keep connecting with Korea, whether they want to learn to speak Korean or maybe even come to visit.

Especially with movies and dramas, many things that we can see, such as makeup, give rise to the beauty industry, fashion, and other things.

And Korean food is attracting a lot of attention too.

So we're seeing more exports of noodles, kimbap, and dumplings.

All of this is the power of culture.

It doesn't show directly, but it's seeping through. The government is hoping to attract 20 million tourists this year.

How close have you come to that, and how much is China's economic uncertainty impacting that goal?

We've had about 10 million tourists so far this year, and we're aiming for 10 million more by the end of the year.

But I wonder if that's a little bit difficult because it's so hot right now, and it's difficult to move around the world.

Still, the tourist arrivals are steadily increasing right now.

Chinese tourists are not visiting as they were before the pandemic.

It's recovered quite a bit, but the biggest problem we have with tourism now is the visa issue.

So if we actually just open up, we would have a lot more people coming.

But right now, quite a few countries have some visa requirements.

We know it's inconvenient, and it's the Ministry of Justice and other ministries that are managing these visas.

So we're still negotiating.

We also still lack a lot of infrastructure, hotels, transportation, things like that, to be able to take in a lot of tourists.

So we have to overcome that.

The fact is that even if we had a lot of people coming now, we probably could not accommodate them all. A cheap yen is leading to a tourism boom in Japan.

How much competition is that for Korea?

We have a lot of Korean people traveling to Japan right now.

We can't do anything to discourage or stop them from going to Japan because it's nearby.

And now that the yen has gotten much cheaper, we're probably enjoying that kind of tourism as well.

So what we're trying to do is to actually incentivize them to travel a lot more domestically.

We're trying to identify famous things and places that we can introduce to people and keep them informed about it. There's anxiety in the international community over infectious diseases such as M-pox.

How's the government assessing this?

Right now, the government is preparing because we didn't have the vaccines and things like that in advance when the coronavirus pandemic happened.

So we're working right now in the early stages, now that we're hearing some rumblings that it could happen and cases are actually increasing a little bit.

So we're being proactive right now and making sure that we have all the money for this one and making sure that we're prepared.