SEOUL, Dec. 5 (Korea Bizwire) — Woori Bank has begun displaying Bitcoin price data alongside exchange rates and stock indexes on the electronic board inside its main dealing room in central Seoul, the bank said Friday — a first among South Korea’s commercial banks and a notable sign of the industry’s growing embrace of digital assets. [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 5 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s household wealth gap widened last year, driven largely by sharp gains in real estate values, according to a nationwide financial welfare survey released on Thursday by the Bank of Korea, the National Data Policy Office, and the Financial Supervisory Service. As of March 2025, the average household’s net [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 4 (Korea Bizwire) — Tax authorities said Thursday they will investigate more than 2,000 cases involving the transfer of high-value properties in upscale areas of Seoul over suspected tax evasion, amid tighter government regulations on real estate lending. A total of 2,077 property-transfer cases in the districts of Gangnam, Mapo, Yongsan and Seongsu [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 4 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s stock market has endured a stretch of whiplash in recent weeks, but low-volatility and high-dividend investment products have emerged as rare winners amid the turbulence. According to data released Wednesday by the Korea Exchange, the TIGER Low Volatility ETF rose 7.1 percent from Nov. 3 to Dec. [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 4 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s major business lobby warned that companies may face nearly 27 trillion won (US$20.4 billion) in carbon-credit purchasing costs over the next five years under the government’s newly announced emissions trading allocation plan. The climate ministry swiftly rejected the estimate, calling it an exaggerated projection based on flawed assumptions. [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 4 (Korea Bizwire) — Amid heightened foreign-exchange volatility this year, South Korea’s major banks have taken markedly different approaches to managing currency risk, newly released filings show. According to third-quarter disclosures from the country’s four largest lenders — KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Hana and Woori — all maintained “long” positions in foreign currency, meaning they [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 3 (Korea Bizwire) — Seoul’s luxury housing market posted one of the world’s sharpest price increases over the past year, rising more than 25 percent and ranking second among major global cities, according to new data released Tuesday. In its latest Prime Global Cities Index, British property consultancy Knight Frank reported that prices for [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 3 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s construction downturn is continuing to weigh heavily on the nation’s banks, with major lenders reporting persistently high levels of bad loans tied to the troubled sector. According to third-quarter disclosures released on Wednesday, the country’s five major banks — KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Hana, Woori and NH NongHyup — [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 3 (Korea Bizwire) — SK Securities on Tuesday released South Korea’s first financial-sector report aligned with the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), marking a significant step toward integrating biodiversity and natural-capital risks into mainstream financial reporting. TNFD, launched in 2021, promotes global standards for assessing and publicly disclosing how companies depend on and [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 2 (Korea Bizwire) — Two senior Coupang executives sold tens of millions of won worth of company stock shortly after a massive data breach occurred — but before the company acknowledged the incident — raising concerns about potential insider trading. According to a Dec. 2 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), [...]