SEOUL, Sept. 7 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean listed companies’ half-year dividends tumbled more than 20 percent this year on the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, market data showed Monday. Local listed firms paid out 2.92 trillion won (US$2.46 billion) in interim dividends in June, down 21.3 percent from a year earlier, according to the [...]
SEOUL, Sept. 6 (Korea Bizwire) — Three-fourths of large companies in South Korea have no hiring plan or have not confirmed their recruiting scheme for the second half of the year amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, a poll showed Sunday. Half of the companies that responded to the Korea Economic Research Institute’s (KERI) survey answered [...]
SEOUL, July 20 (Korea Bizwire) – Three-fourths of large companies in South Korea are resorting to flextime in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, a poll showed Monday. According to the survey of 120 big businesses concerned, 75 percent of the respondents said they have newly adopted or expanded flextime due to the COVID-19 outbreak. [...]
SEOUL, June 16 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean businesses’ sales and profitability worsened in the first quarter from three months earlier, central bank data showed Tuesday, amid slowing demand at home and abroad caused by the spread of the new coronavirus. In the January-March period, sales of local businesses dropped at an average 1.5 percent [...]
SEOUL, June 2 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s major companies saw their profitability sink to a 10-year low in 2019 amid an economic slowdown, data showed Tuesday. The average operating margin of the country’s 2,000 major listed companies came to 5.1 percent last year, down from 8.8 percent in 2018 and the lowest level since [...]
SEOUL, May 22 (Korea Bizwire) – The market capitalization of Samsung Biologics Co. and internet giant Naver Corp. has jumped sharply on South Korea’s main stock market over a one-year period, despite the coronavirus impact on the equities markets, data showed Friday. Samsung Biologics’ market cap stood at 40.3 trillion won (US$32.6 billion) at Thursday [...]
SEOUL, May 17 (Korea Bizwire) — One in three companies in South Korea may trim workers in the future if the economy does not show signs of a significant recovery from the new coronavirus pandemic, a poll showed Sunday. In the poll conducted by the Korea Economic Research Institute, about 30 percent of the surveyed [...]
SEOUL, May 14 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean firms are again beefing up their virus prevention measures after the country reported cluster infections linked to clubs and bars in a popular nightlife neighborhood in Seoul, industry insiders said Thursday. After the country shifted to an “everyday life quarantine” scheme to normalize social and economic activities [...]
SEOUL, April 29 (Korea Bizwire) — Large companies in South Korea have trimmed more than 10,000 jobs over the past two months in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, a corporate tracker said Wednesday. According to CEO Score, 492 out of the country’s top 500 firms by sales had a combined 1,644,868 employees subscribing to [...]
SEOUL, April 10 (Korea Bizwire) — The social distancing movement that is seen as a significant measure in the fight against the novel coronavirus is changing the landscape of work environments as more companies are implementing ‘untact’ working procedures. Lotte Home Shopping Inc., a shopping unit of retail conglomerate Lotte, is implementing untact working procedures [...]