SEOUL, Nov. 21 (Korea Bizwire) — KB Kookmin Bank, one of South Korea’s major lenders, has decided to suspend new household loans for home purchases for the rest of 2025 amid government efforts to cool an overheated property market and curb household lending, officials said Friday. New applications for mortgage loans for home purchases will [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 20 (Korea Bizwire) – South Korean retail investors have been scooping up gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs) this month, data showed Thursday, as they searched for safer assets amid a volatile stock market. Individual investors purchased a net 5.4 trillion won (US$3.7 billion) of ACE KRX Gold Spot ETFs from Nov. 3 until Wednesday, [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 20 (Korea Bizwire) – South Korea’s customs authorities on Thursday announced plans to reduce paperwork requirements and speed up the customs clearance process for imports, a move aimed at lessening regulatory burdens on local businesses. Under a revised law currently undergoing administrative notice, procedures for re-importing returned goods will be simplified, according to [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 20 (Korea Bizwire) — Once a nostalgic winter street snack sold from roadside carts, bungeoppang — Korea’s fish-shaped pastry filled traditionally with sweet red bean — is fast becoming a breakout product in the global bakery market, buoyed by advances in frozen food technology and the worldwide rise of Korean pop culture. According to [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 19 (Korea Bizwire) — A large majority of South Korean workers say the country’s labor market is fundamentally unequal, reflecting long-standing structural divides between large conglomerates and smaller firms, according to new research presented at a major labor conference in Seoul on Tuesday. The survey, released at the 30th-anniversary forum of the Federation [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 19 (Korea Bizwire) — LG AI Research is accelerating its entry into major global equity markets with a new artificial intelligence–driven forecasting model developed in partnership with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), aiming to capture rising demand for automated investing tools. The model, called the AI Equity Forecasting Score (AEFS), analyzes roughly 5,000 [...]
SEJONG, Nov. 19 (Korea Bizwire) – South Korea’s finance minister said Wednesday that signs of an economic rebound are becoming increasingly evident, pointing to aggressive fiscal spending and more targeted policy management as key drivers. At a meeting of economy-related ministers in Sejong, Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol said consumer spending has begun to strengthen, helped [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 18 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea has secured a decisive victory in its protracted legal war with Lone Star Funds, closing a contentious chapter that has shaped the country’s financial and political landscape for more than two decades. The U.S. private equity firm—long criticized in Korea as a predatory “vulture fund”—first entered the market [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 18 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s consumer goods exports—long considered a supporting player to the country’s heavyweight industries—are rapidly emerging as a new growth engine, fueled by the global spread of Hallyu and the runaway popularity of titles like the animated film K-Pop Demon Hunters. Government data show that exports of K-food, K-beauty, and [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 17 (Korea Bizwire) — Natural gas prices have surged to their highest level in nearly three years, lifting related exchange-traded notes (ETNs) while exposing South Korean retail investors to mounting losses after many bet on the market moving in the opposite direction. Between Nov. 1 and 14, nine of the ten best-performing ETNs in [...]