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, Jan. 2 (Korea Bizwire) — Sales of traditional cultural merchandise tied to South Korea’s palaces and heritage sites reached a record high last year, buoyed by the global surge of interest in K-culture and the growing appeal of heritage-inspired products to foreign visitors. The Korea Heritage Agency (KHA) said Friday that combined online and offline [...]
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 [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 29 (Korea Bizwire) — Nearly one in 20 South Koreans has limited monthly social interaction through mobile communications, highlighting a growing segment of the population at risk of social isolation, according to a government-backed data analysis released on Monday. The findings, published by the National Data Agency, mark the first nationwide statistical attempt to [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 29 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s fried chicken industry has crossed a symbolic threshold, with the number of franchise outlets nationwide surpassing 30,000 for the first time, even as signs of market saturation intensify and growth prospects dim at home. According to the National Data Policy Agency’s 2024 Franchise Statistics released on December [...]