SEOUL, April 12 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s job additions snapped their nine-month decline in March in the face of an economic slowdown, but most jobs were created for the over-60 age group, data showed Wednesday. The number of employed people came to 28.22 million last month, up around 469,000 from a year earlier, according [...]
SEOUL, April 11 (Korea Bizwire) — Large South Korean firms saw their interest expenses spike more than 50 percent in 2022 from a year earlier due to rising interest rates, a corporate tracker said Tuesday. The combined interest cost of 377 out of the country’s top 500 firms by sales stood at 39.9 trillion won [...]
SEOUL, April 10 (Korea Bizwire) — Foreign investors turned net sellers of South Korean stocks in March amid the collapses of Silicon Valley Bank in the United States and the global bank Credit Suisse, central bank data showed Monday. Offshore investors sold a net US$1.73 billion worth of local stocks last month, a turnaround from [...]
SEOUL, April 10 (Korea Bizwire) — More than half of major listed firms in South Korea saw their financial soundness worsen in 2022 amid high global interest rates and inflation, data showed Monday. The debt-to-equity ratio of 56 out of the 106 listed companies belonging to the country’s top 10 business groups increased last year [...]
SEOUL, April 9 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s superrich had an average of 32.3 billion won (US$24.5 million) of assets last year, and their yearly income came to about 1.23 billion won, a report showed Sunday. The Hana Institute for Finance, affiliated with major lender Hana Bank, defined the superrich in its report as those [...]
SEOUL, April 9 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s exports of instant noodles jumped 14.3 percent on-year in the first three months of 2023 to reach the highest figure for any first quarter ever amid the growing popularity of the Korean culture, data showed Sunday. The country exported US$208 million worth of instant noodles, or “ramyeon” [...]
SEOUL, April 9 (Korea Bizwire) — Nearly half of single-member households were in the poor class and the proportion among senior citizens came to nearly 70 percent, a report showed Sunday. The relative poverty rate of one-person households came to 47.2 percent in 2020, compared with 15.3 percent for all households, according to the report [...]
SEOUL, April 7 (Korea Bizwire) — The number of teenage drug offenders more than octupled in South Korea last year compared with about a decade earlier, a minor opposition party said Friday. Teenagers apprehended for using drugs totaled 481 last year, jumping more than eight times from 58 in 2013, the Justice Party said, citing [...]
SEOUL, April 6 (Korea Bizwire) — More than 60 percent of South Koreans voiced the need for Seoul to independently build its own nuclear weapons, a survey showed Thursday, in the latest indication that the people are more open to atomic weapons amid growing military threats from North Korea. According to the poll of 1,000 [...]
SEOUL, April 6 (Korea Bizwire) — Foreign direct investment (FDI) pledges to South Korea rose 3.4 percent on-year in the first quarter of 2023 to reach the highest first-quarter figure ever, data showed Thursday. The country received US$5.63 billion of FDI commitments in the January-March period, compared with $5.45 billion logged a year earlier, according [...]