- Collaborating on Smart Data Center, Smart Factory, and Smart Construction Project.

POSCO ICT(CEO Choi Doo Whan) will reportedly collaborate with USA’s DPR Construction, who became the center of attention for building Apple’s new office and Facebook’s data center, to construct smart data centers and smart factories in the smart construction oriented ‘Smart X’ business.

On January 9, the both companies met together at the main office of DPR Construction located in San Francisco, USA. At the meeting, POSCO CEO, Kwon Oh Joon, POSCO ICT CEO, Choi Doo Whan, DPR Construction CEO, Eric Lamb, and President, George Pfeffer, along with many other guests related to the companies, joined together to sign an MOU.

DPR Construction is the number one U.S. company in the fields of luxury construction such as data centers or advanced factories. Even in Korea, it constructed Hanna Bank’s data center and recorded a revenue of about 600 million KRW as of 2017. It has maintained the average annual growth rate of more than 20% in the last five years and, as a result, Fortune lists it as the number 1 construction company that Americans want to work for.

Through this joint effort, POSCO group, mainly led by POSCO ICT, will jointly pursue the Smart X business including smart data center construction, smart factory, and construction solution supplies.

First of all, there are a lot of high anticipations on collaborations on the smart data center construction projects. Recently, as new services using Cloud, Big Data, AI and so on are launched, the demands for data centers in Korea and abroad are exploding; thus, POSCO ICT is willing to form a one-team system with DPR Construction to aggressively participate in data center constructions in Asia, including Korea, and USA. If POSCO ICT’s good experiences in implementing data centers for POSCO group and reliably operating ICT and DPR Construction’s know-how’s in construction work can be combined together, great outcomes can be expected. DPR Construction is known for its high customer loyalty as it received the reorder rate of higher than 90%, such as in data center construction for main companies like Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.

As smart factory is the world’s first one implemented in the process manufacturing area, POSCO ICT will pursue the project to spread it to overseas industrial fields such as those in the USA. DPR Construction has recorded very good business in the field of factory construction in USA, and POSCO group would like to apply its smart factory technology to the factory built by DPR Construction. Besides, they will also pursue  a project to supply smart construction technology such as BIM (building information model) that supports design and construction management in the 3D virtual reality space owned by DPR Construction on a cloud basis.

An authority from POSCO ICT said, “With PosFrame as the world’s first smart industry platform in the process manufacturing area, we are aggressively pursuing the smart X business such as Smart Factory, Smart Building & City, Smart Energy, etc.” He added, “Through collaboration with DPR Construction, we will level up the competitiveness of the ‘Smart X’ business we have been pursuing in the past and explore the wider overseas market.”