OREANDA-NEWS. September 05, 2014. POSCO hosted the 26th POSCO Family Technical Conference at POSTECH. The Conference is a special festival for engineers designed to raise the company`s technical competitiveness to the next level.

The technical conference, scheduled to end on August 21, has been held every year since 1989 as a venue for technical discussions in order to stimulate the development of new steel technology and enhance shared growth and customer values by reinforcing technical competitiveness across the POSCO family.

This year saw 2000 people attend the conference, including POSCO Group officials, outsourcing partners and interested persons from domestic universities and research institutes. Attendees actively engaged in technical discussions. The technical conference, which ran for 23 sessions on day 1 and 28 sessions on day 2, saw 249 papers be presented in guest lectures and technical discussions. As a result, a staggering 6,450 papers have now been presented in the history of the technical conference.

Kwon Oh-joon, the CEO of POSCO, said in his opening speech that the key to overcoming the crisis facing POSCO today is the `realization of technical POSCO,` and he underlined to participants that they should awaken their passion within.

``Engineers must take the initiative to reinforce the intrinsic competiveness of steel through solution marketing,`` said Mr. Kwon. ``We must have a clear competitive edge over our competitors and, for that, we need to be able to maintain a super technical barrier, i.e. an insurmountable technical entry barrier.`` He went on to explain, ``As the company is trying its best to foster the new growth industry based on the principle of choice and focus, I encourage you all to take an active part in securing a mega growth engine for the future, and be sure to drastically accelerate the speed of technical development through open collaboration, i.e. cooperation between engineers and researchers and technical exchange between processes.``

Lee Hee-guk, the CEO of LG, took the podium and gave a keynote speech on `the Direction of the Energy Market and forecast of the Next-generation Energy Technology.` In guest lectures of each session, 23 domestic and foreign experts discussed various topics in the steel and non-steel sectors, including Prof. Lee Gyeong-woo of Seoul National University, who presented a lecture on `Transport for Analysis of the Deoxidation Behavior on the LF Process`.

Day 2 of the conference was held on August 21 and saw technical discussions held in which the employees of POSCO Group were able to enjoy presentations on steel and non-steel topics and panel discussions.

Meanwhile, on August 20 before the opening of the conference, the POSCO Family Technical Awards Ceremony was also held. Five innovation projects received the top prize, i.e. the innovation awards, with 7 projects receiving creative awards and 8 projects receiving the takeoff awards. A total of 27 departments were honored with awards, including 7 challenge, failure and good idea awards.