Mexico seeks broader trade, investment and technology cooperation with Korea during a Seoul visit focused on electric vehicles, semiconductors and education.
Foreign Minister Cho Hyun, right, shakes hands with Mexican Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco Álvarez during a meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Seoul on Aug. 24.NEWS1
Roberto Velasco Álvarez
The author is Mexico’s foreign minister.
The bond between Mexico and Korea is older and deeper than most people realize. Long before we established formal relations in 1962, Korean migration to Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century laid the foundations for enduring ties between our peoples. Over generations, the Korean community in Mexico has established a strong presence, enriching our country’s cultural, social and economic life.
A hundred and twenty years of shared history lie beneath the partnership our two governments are building today. That is why I am in Seoul to meet Foreign Minister Cho Hyun, a visit meant to translate a strong relationship into concrete results our two societies can measure.
The figures describe a partnership that keeps growing. Bilateral trade reached $27 billion in 2025. Korea is among Mexico’s five largest trading partners, and Mexico is Korea’s leading partner in Latin America. Korean investment since 2006 totals $11.5 billion, across more than 2,000 companies.
Our ambition now is to broaden that exchange in both directions, expanding and diversifying what Mexico sells to Korea so that our trade becomes more balanced as it grows. A bilateral working group created for precisely that purpose met for the first time in Mexico City on Aug. 1.
These numbers reveal a clear industrial pattern. Take electric mobility. On July 29, President Claudia Sheinbaum and Kia announced $649 million to build electric vehicles in the northern state of Nuevo León, with a charging network and clean generation on site. In turn, Posco — which has invested over $800 million in Mexico — now produces motor cores for electric vehicles in neighboring Coahuila. A Korean supply chain is taking shape on Mexican soil.
The same is happening in energy and electronics. Samsung E&A helped build the Olmeca refinery on the Gulf coast and is now raising a $3.3 billion methanol plant in Sinaloa — the largest ultralow-emission facility of its kind anywhere — due to open in 2029 with 6,400 jobs. LG runs eight plants across northern and central Mexico and employs 8,100 people, with $2.28 billion in new investment announced. These are not outposts. They are part of how Mexico manufactures.
Korean readers may recognize the logic of what we are trying to do next. Plan México, launched by President Sheinbaum in 2025, is industrial policy in the full sense: the state setting national goals and aligning public investment, development banking and government procurement behind them. Its targets are concrete: 150,000 professionals trained each year in strategic sectors, investment lifted from 25 to 28 percent of GDP, and domestic capability built in semiconductors, biotechnology, electromobility and aerospace.
Science and education are also at the center of this visit instead of at its margins. I will meet the leadership of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Seoul to explore what our institutions can build together in artificial intelligence, semiconductors and advanced training. In space, such cooperation already runs: the Korea Aerospace Research Institute is a permanent technical adviser to the Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency.
Our cooperation extends beyond trade and technology. Through Mikta, the group named after the initials of Mexico, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey and Australia, Korea participated in funding the rehabilitation of a primary school in Acapulco damaged by Hurricane Otis — a concrete example of humanitarian cooperation for which we are grateful. That habit of working side by side will matter in 2028, when Korea assumes the Group of 20 presidency and Mexico hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
Our societies, for their part, move at a pace of their own. Last May, President Sheinbaum welcomed BTS to a balcony of the National Palace, and 50,000 people filled Mexico’s most important public space, el Zócalo, to greet them. Mexico is one of the largest audiences for Korean music anywhere in the world. And in June we had the pleasure of receiving Korean fans in our stadiums for the World Cup: the rivalry lasted 90 minutes, the friendship goes on.
Nobody in those early days I mentioned, back in the 20th century, could have imagined that the two countries would one day be building satellites and semiconductors together. That is the difference between a history we inherited and a future we get to design. Mexico has come to Seoul to build it together.
