South Korean President Moon Jae-in is expected to visit Malaysia next year.

His impending state visit was on the agenda of discussion at Wisma Putra, here, today between Malaysia's Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah and his South Korean counterpart Kang Kyung-wha, who is in the country for a two-day working visit.

“Among others, we discussed the state visit of South Korean President Moon Jae-in to Malaysia in the first quarter of 2019, probably in March,” said Saifuddin after their meeting, which also touched on the good relations between Malaysia and South Korea.

Saifuddin said several memorandums of understanding were expected to be signed during President Moon’s visit.

During the one-hour meeting, Saifuddin and Kang also talked on the Asean-Republic of Korea Commemorative Summit, which will be held in Seoul in the third quarter of next year.

“We were also given the latest update of negotiations between South Korea and North Korea and looks like there has been some development,”said Saifuddin.

He said new areas of cooperation, especially in technology and education, were also discussed at the meeting.

“We want to enhance innovation as we will embrace Industrial Revolution 4.0 while in education, we talked on students and academic exchange programmes,” he said, adding that one important matter that Malaysia wanted to learn from South Korea was discipline.

South Korea is Malaysia’s 8th largest trading partner globally and 13th largest foreign investor in 2017. Bilateral trade between Malaysia and South Korea grew by 13.6 percent in 2017 to reach RM67.71 billion from the previous year’s figure.

- Bernama