Seoul Metropolitan Government to host largest ever ‘Seoul Pavilion’ at CES 2024 18 companies win innovation awards

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon attended the opening of CES 2024 in Las Vegas, USA, on Tuesday 9 January at 11:00 a.m. to network with global corporations, start-ups, governments and information technology (IT) experts from around the world to promote Seoul’s smart city competitiveness and Korean companies on the world stage.

CES is the world’s largest information and communications technology (ICT) tradeshow, organised by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and held every January in Las Vegas, USA. Global companies at the forefront of IT trends and start-ups with cutting-edge technologies participate in CES, which serves as a business platform for investors, technologists and consumers from around the world.

The City of Seoul will operate the largest Seoul Pavilion ever at CES 2024, which opened in Las Vegas, USA, for four days from Tuesday 9 January to Friday 12 January.

Since its first participation in CES 2020 with 20 companies, Seoul has operated the Seoul Pavilion to support investment and sales of innovative companies based in Seoul. As the number of participating companies and the number of innovation awards for innovative technologies and products have increased, the city plans to expand the city-led public-private entrepreneurship ecosystem to help innovative startups attract the attention of investors.

The 13 partner institutions involved this year include the Seoul
Business Agency, Seoul BioHub, Seoul AI Hub, Gwanak-gu, Campus Town Enterprise Growth Centre, Korea University, Yonsei University, Sogang University, Hanyang University, Chung-Ang University, Konkuk University, Kookmin University and Kyung Hee University.

At CES 2024 <Seoul Pavilion>, the 670-square-metre National Startup Exhibition Hall, Eureka Park (Tech West), showcased innovative technologies and products from 13 organisations, including Seoul BioHub and Seoul AI Hub, and 81 Seoul-based startups to investors from around the world.

Pavilion won CES 2024 Innovation Awards. Two companies, Toptable (personalised nutrition) and Roadsystem (mobile passport), won the Best Innovation Award, which is given to only 1% of the participating companies, such as higher scores among the innovation award products.

Established in 1976, the CES Innovation Awards are presented by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) to recognise innovative products and new technologies that are technologically, aesthetically and innovatively superior, and are judged by global corporate executives and industry experts. At this year’s CES, 36 Best Innovative Awards and 522 Innovation Awards were presented in 29 categories.

At 11am local time on Tuesday (9), Mayor Oh joined CTA Chairman Gary Shapiro, representatives from participating companies and more than 100 other people at the Seoul Pavilion opening event, where they visited the booths of participating companies to experience the innovative technologies and products on display, and pledged full support to help innovative start-ups expand their technologies and services to overseas markets.

The opening ceremony, which began with a video of Seoul residents cheering on Seoul startups, also featured the lighting of the Seoul Startup Innovation Tree, which symbolises the growth of startup seeds sown in Seoul into global companies.

This year, the Seoul Pavilion showcased innovative technologies and products from 81 companies in six sectors, including healthcare (31), AI (25), manufacturing (11), mobility (7), ESG (4) and quantum (3), and held pitching and networking programmes for global investors and buyers.

At the luncheon meeting with representatives of the Innovation Award winners, Mayor Oh encouraged companies that have achieved good results with innovative technologies and products despite the challenging conditions of global investment, and listened to the voices of the field, such as regulations and difficulties encountered in the process of global expansion and commercialisation.

In particular, the City of Seoul will expand its support to remove regulatory barriers that discourage entrepreneurship in new industries and new technology start-ups, and will act as a delivery platform, actively recommending areas for central government to clear.

Meanwhile, prior to the opening ceremony of the Seoul Pavilion at CES 2024, Mayor Oh met with Eui-sun Chung, Chairman of Hyundai Motor Group, at 9:00 a.m. local time, and visited Hyundai’s booth and experienced a one-on-one test drive of a future mobility vehicle. During the meeting, Mayor Oh introduced mobility innovations such as autonomous driving and UAM as a solution to the logistics crisis caused by the lack of productive population due to the declining birthrate and aging population in the near future, and requested Hyundai’s participation and cooperation in the “Seoul Smart Life Week”, which will be held as a venue for future high-tech festivals.

The City of Seoul has collaborated with Hyundai on the early commercialisation of autonomous driving and UAM, such as the robot taxi in Gangnam and the autonomous short-distance shuttle service in Yeouido. Building on this collaboration, the city plans to further strengthen its future mobility partnership with Hyundai to demonstrate and commercialise innovative technologies in Seoul, a leading smart city.

In 2021, Mayor Oh Se-hoon announced at a press conference on the ‘Seoul Autonomous Driving Vision 2030’ that the city will invest $113 million (KRW 148.7 billion) over five years until 2026 to build autonomous driving infrastructure across Seoul. In his New Year’s speech this year, he also highlighted his ambition to establish driverless ‘autonomous buses’ as a new form of public transport and to make them a representative tourist product that symbolises Seoul’s high-tech industry.

“This year, a record number of companies participated in the Seoul Pavilion at CES, and 18 of them won the ‘Innovation Award’, setting the stage for high-speed growth,” said Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon. “The City of Seoul will continue to support innovative companies by providing research and development, test beds and start-up spaces, and I sincerely hope that the Korean companies that participated in CES will have a ‘rosy bright future’, just like this year’s Seoul colour (Sky Coral) that coloured the Seoul Pavilion.”