SEOUL, Jan. 9 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s airports handled a record number of passengers in 2025, as a surge in overseas travel more than offset a decline in domestic flights, underscoring the continued strength of outbound demand in a post-pandemic travel market. According to data released Friday by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 9 (Korea Bizwire) — Foreign nationals are becoming increasingly common among the founding families of South Korea’s largest conglomerates, particularly in the third and fourth generations, raising new questions about corporate governance and disclosure rules, according to a recent study. An analysis released Wednesday by CEO Score found that 41 members of controlling shareholder [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 7 (Korea Bizwire) — South Koreans spend nearly 250 million won (about $190,000) per person on medical care over their lifetimes, according to a new analysis that underscores how rapidly rising healthcare costs are becoming concentrated in old age as the population grows older. A report released Wednesday by the Health Insurance Research Institute [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 7 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean teenagers are spending more than three hours a day watching online video content, with short-form clips rapidly overtaking longer videos as their dominant mode of media consumption, according to a new national survey. The findings were released on Wednesday by the Korea Press Foundation in its 2025 survey [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 6 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s long-running legal battle against tobacco companies is drawing renewed attention as new research shows that smoking has imposed an enormous and growing burden on the national health insurance system. According to a study released Monday by the National Health Insurance Service’s research arm, smoking-related medical costs totaled an [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 4 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s demographic shift toward an aging and increasingly solitary population accelerated in 2025, with people aged 65 and older now accounting for more than one-fifth of the country’s registered residents, government data showed, underscoring mounting social and economic challenges for the nation. According to an annual population analysis released [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 4 (Korea Bizwire) — Foreign investors’ presence in South Korea’s stock market climbed to its highest level in nearly six years in December, buoyed by a sharp rally in equities and growing optimism about the country’s semiconductor industry. Foreign ownership reached 32.9 percent of total market capitalization, the highest since April 2020, after overseas [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 4 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean families are spending far more on private education than they did a decade ago, underscoring how deeply supplemental tutoring has become embedded in the country’s competitive education system. Household spending on private education — including hagwons, or for-profit after-school academies — reached nearly 29.2 trillion won ($20.2 billion) [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 31 (Korea Bizwire) — The number of high-skilled workers in South Korea grew for the fourth consecutive year in 2024, with such jobs in the semiconductor sector increasing by the most, government data showed Wednesday. The total number of industrial technology workers stood at 1.74 million as of end-2024, up 1.1 percent from [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 30 (Korea Bizwire) — Only 36.7 percent of Japanese people said they support efforts to provide diplomatic support to achieve peace on the Korean Peninsula, hovering well below the global average, a survey showed Tuesday. The percentage of Japanese citizens who backed the idea of offering economic and military support also stood at [...]