• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.41-61
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• 2020

China's rapid development and commercialization of high-tech technologies in the fourth industrial revolution has led to effective technology exchanges between Korean and Chinese firms becoming more important to Korea's mid-term and long-term industrial development. However, there is still a lack of empirical research on how technology exchanges between Korean and Chinese firms proceed and their effectiveness. In response, this study conducted a social network analysis based on text mining data of Korea-China business technology exchange and cooperation articles introduced in the news from 2018 to March 2020 on the current status and effects of Korea-China technology exchanges related to the fourth industrial revolution, and conducted a regression analysis how network centrality effect on the firm performance. According to the results, most of the Korean major electronic firms are actively networking with Chinese firms and institutions, showing high centrality in the centrality index. Korean telecommunication firms showed high betweenness centrality and subgraph centrality, and Korean Internet service providers and broadcasting contents firms showed high eigenvector centrality. In addition, Chinese firms showed higher betweenness centrality than Korean firms, and Chinese service firms showed higher closeness centrality than manufacturing firms. As a result of regression analysis, this network centrality had a positive effect on firm performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first to analyze the impact of the technical cooperation between Korean and Chinese firms under the fourth industrial revolution context. This study has theoretical implications that suggested the direction of social network analysis-based empirical research in global firm cooperation. Also, this study has practical implications that the guidelines for network analysis in setting the direction of technical cooperation between Korea and China by firms or governments.