South Korea is fine-tuning a set of new tax incentives to make companies bring some manufacturing back home.

The parliament has so far proposed 12 bills related to reshoring, such as stretching the deadline of tax and tariff exemptions for reshoring companies to 2025 from 2021.

Efforts are also underway to extend the relief on income and corporate taxes. Currently, companies are fully waived of the taxes in their first four years of return and levied only 50 percent in the following two years. This could be extended to five and three years, respectively.

Just six companies have returned home since the new reshoring program was announced as part of the government’s second-half economic guideline on June 1. More than half of this year’s reshoring cases have taken place in the two months after the state announcement, with one company expected to bring manufacturing work worth as much as 50 billion won ($42.2 million), according to the trade ministry.

But it remains to be seen whether the incentives would be enough to buck the trend.

The number of Korean companies that took their manufacturing abroad rose 12 percent over the past three years, according to the Export-Import Bank of Korea.

This trend was also apparent last year. According to the Federation of Korean Industries, a Seoul-based business lobby group, Korea’s reshoring index in 2019 was -37, with the negative figure indicating the extent of offshoring. The country’s dependency on overseas supply chains has also deepened since 2013.

By Oh Chan-jong and Kim Hyo-jin

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