SEOUL, Oct. 20 (Korea Bizwire) – There’s now less than a day left before the Korean launch of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, and the local mobile phone market is already expecting record success for Apple’s latest smartphones. The phones will be making their debut here at 8 a.m. on Friday. According to [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 20 (Korea Bizwire) – Sales at South Korea’s duty-free stores rose 36.4 percent in the first nine months of this year from a year earlier on increased buying by foreign tourists, especially Chinese, data showed Thursday. Sales at 50 duty-free stores nationwide came to 8.93 trillion won (US$7.9 billion) in the January-September period, [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 18 (Korea Bizwire) – Chinese travelers in their 20s and 30s have emerged as the key customers for South Korean duty-free stores as they are enticed by Korean pop culture and shopping experiences here, industry officials said Monday. Local duty-free shops in the past mostly generated revenue from middle-aged Chinese travelers who bought [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 17 (Korea Bizwire) – With several high profile controversies over toxic chemical content and high electromagnetic wave emissions in Korean products, domestic consumers are flocking to European options instead, in search of safer goods. Italian home appliance brand Imetec saw sales rise by 629 percent in September compared to September 2015, mainly driven [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 17 (Korea Bizwire) – Rock and Blues legend Bob Dylan has shown that music is also worthy of literature’s highest honor, the Nobel Prize, and it is now attracting Korea’s nostalgic consumers, largely in their 40s and 50s, for a trip down memory lane. According to online bookstore Yes24, 294 copies of Dylan’s [...]
BUSAN, Oct. 14 (Korea Bizwire) – May is no longer the most favorable month for weddings Korea, recent data shows. Instead, fall has become the most popular season for those tying the knot. Based on Lotte Department Store’s “Wedding Members” data, October saw the highest percentage of weddings at 19 percent in 2015, followed by [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 13 (Korea Bizwire) – China was the biggest buyer of South Korean beauty products, taking up almost half of the country’s cosmetics sold overseas last year, data showed Thursday. According to the data submitted by the Korea Health Industry Development Institute to the National Assembly, China accounted for 41.1 percent of South Korea’s [...]
SEJONG, Oct. 13 (Korea Bizwire) – South Korean retailers saw their sales increase more than 10 percent during a nationwide shopping festival that started late last month thanks to rising demand from Chinese shoppers, government data showed Thursday. The massive shopping campaign called “Korea Sale Festa,” which began Sept. 29 for 11 days, was designed [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 12 (Korea Bizwire) – Social commerce companies are putting an end to competing each other with free delivery services as operating losses continue to soar. Coupang doubled the minimum purchase required for free delivery (Rocket Delivery) from 9,800 ($8.73) to 19,800 starting Tuesday. Rocket Delivery is the company’s ambitious service that offers delivery within [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 12 (Korea Bizwire) – Samsung Electronics Co. said Wednesday it has revised its operating profit estimate for the third quarter down to 5.2 trillion won (US$4.6 billion), hit by the permanent end of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. Samsung had previously estimated that its operating profit for the July-September period may stand at [...]