Yonsei University School of Business and Yonsei Business Research Institute held a themed lecture on "Future Mobility & Digital Transformation" by Taebong Koh, Head of Research of HI Investment & Securities, for the fifth webinar series. Based on his experience working at a research center for securities firms and his analytical skills as an analyst for the automobile industry, Taebong Koh pointed out the need for digital/fusion new technologies for companies to stay competitive in the post-COVID-19 era and introduced future mobility changes based on digitalization.

With regard to the uncertain future, Taebong Koh emphasized two major changes. One is that many countries have recently declared that they will go zero-carbon and carbon-neutral. As a result, the world will eventually be transforming in an eco-friendly way. Another change, he pointed out, is that now companies related to digital transformation have to analyze and examine the current changes in a very clear and detailed manner in order not to fall behind.

Koh explained that digitalization is the key to changing the world in the future. And the key of digitalization is to utilize data to provide convenience. The core of digital transformation is the process of collecting and storing input data, monitoring the data, and generating results through big data analysis, problem-solving, and prediction. Hence companies should pay attention to not only the automobile industry, but also the 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud, mobility, and robots related fields.

The four major trends in the future automobile industry include CASE (Connectivity, Autonomous Shared & Service, Electric). Among these four, C, A, and E are hardware changes. The hardware equipped with all these three is driven by the base of an electric vehicle with no engine room. Autonomous driving is installed as a basic standard, eliminating the need for a driver's operating space. In addition, V2X (Vehicle to Everything) that connects cars to all objects will become possible based on 5G communication without delay at all, making the car much smarter, eliminating accidents, and connecting with everything in the car.

This change and convergence of CASE will eventually enable the realization of the TaaS3.0 (Transportation as a Service) era, a model in which autonomous driving and ride-sharing are combined. This will completely change the business model of the existing automobile industry. In other words, if the traditional automobile industry model was handing over ownership of the vehicle to consumers with added value, in the TaaS 3.0 era, the key is how much profits can be obtained for cars using the platform. In addition, the convergence of various relevant technologies can expand to various industries such as construction robot, urban air mobility, last mile delivery robot through autonomous vehicles, and last mile mobility.

Taebong Koh mentioned the case of Google's Waymo, which is currently pioneering in the field of autonomous driving, as well as the cases of many automobile companies such as Volkswagen, Uber, and Tesla. He concluded the lecture by re-emphasizing that the convergence of CASE is ultimately the core of the automobile market.