Sagong Myeong, president of the Korea Railroad Research Institute. [Korea Railroad Research Institute]
Sagong Myeong, president of the Korea Railroad Research Institute. [Korea Railroad Research Institute]

Sound industrial policy begins with an accurate diagnosis of the industry itself. Policymakers need to know which sectors are growing and where companies and jobs are concentrated before they can set priorities. In that sense, industrial statistics are the "numbers" that let us read the present and plan for the future.

This is particularly true in the rail industry, where diverse technical fields are tightly interwoven. Rail is a complex ecosystem in which vehicles and components, track and civil works, electrification and power systems, signaling and communications, maintenance, engineering, and digital services all function as a single system. The performance of any one segment alone cannot explain the scale or competitiveness of the industry as a whole.

Yet we lack the numbers that show rail as an "industry." Representative rail statistics currently available in Korea focus mainly on operational conditions — rolling stock and facility inventories, route lengths, ridership, and operating profit and loss. They tell us how trains run and how many people use them, but they do not adequately capture how many companies build and maintain that rail network, how much revenue and employment they generate, or what technologies they hold. We have statistics on operations; we do not have statistics on the industry.

One reason is that the rail industry does not appear as a single, coherent sector in existing industrial classifications. The Korea Standard Industrial Classification (KSIC) distinguishes some categories for rail vehicle and component manufacturing, but the many companies that make up the rail industry are scattered across manufacturing, construction, information and communications, and professional services. In practice, they form a single industrial ecosystem building one rail system together — yet the statistics cannot capture them as one industry.

In response, the Korea Railroad Research Institute is developing a classification framework tailored to the rail industry — one that reflects both domestic and international classification practices and the specific characteristics of rail technology. On that foundation, the institute is building a statistical base that tracks companies as the unit of analysis, enabling continuous monitoring of firm counts, sales, employment, imports and exports, research and development investment, and technology holdings. The goal is to systematically identify rail-related companies and economic activity that have been invisible, scattered across existing industrial classifications, and bring them into view under a single "rail industry" lens.

What matters most is how these numbers are used. By tracking changes in market size and growth by segment — along with shifts in employment, exports and R&D — policymakers can distinguish high-potential areas from those with weak industrial foundations, and set more precise priorities for research and development, corporate support, workforce development and overseas expansion. Time-series data accumulated year after year also give the government a basis for designing and evaluating policy, while giving companies the information they need to spot market shifts and new project opportunities.

The United Kingdom's rail workforce survey offers a compelling example of this kind of application. The National Skills Academy for Rail (NSAR) aggregates workforce data and related information from rail companies to map the industry's overall labor structure and the supply and demand of workers by job category, diagnosing current and future shortfalls to inform strategic workforce planning and skilled-worker recruitment. Its 2025 survey estimated the rail workforce at approximately 222,000 and projected that up to 70,000 could leave the industry by 2030 through retirement and other attrition. That analysis goes beyond a simple headcount: it identifies job categories expected to face future shortages, assesses demand for skilled workers, and provides the evidence base for workforce development and hiring strategies. It is a clear demonstration of how industrial statistics can uncover an industry's problems and set the direction for future policy.

Raising the competitiveness of the rail industry requires accurate "numbers" that illuminate the industry itself, every bit as much as it requires technological development. Only when industrial numbers are added to operational numbers does the full landscape of the rail industry come into view. Those numbers will make clear what our rail industry needs to prepare for and where it should concentrate its capabilities — and they will serve as the reference point for drawing the blueprint of the rail industry's future.


nbgkoo@heraldcorp.com