SEOUL, May 9 (Korea Bizwire) – The Korea Fair Trade Commission (FTC) is mounting a legal challenge against South Korean retail giants including E-mart, Lotte Mart, and Homeplus over their misleading ‘buy one, get one free’ deals, after reports emerged accusing the supermarket chains of doubling the original price of products to deceive consumers. The FTC [...]
SEOUL, April 7 (Korea Bizwire) – The country’s top court on Friday overturned an acquittal handed down to local retailer Homeplus Co. over illegally selling customer data to insurance firms. The retailer was indicted in February 2015 on charges of gathering more than 24 million pieces of customer data, including birthdates and the number of [...]
SEOUL, July 15 (Korea Bizwire) – The fact that large corporations still abuse their market power to bully smaller enterprises would hardly come as a surprise to most Koreans. Just two months ago, Korea’s leading hypermarket franchises, Homeplus, E-mart and Lotte Mart, were fined 22 billion, 1 billion, and 850 million won, respectively, for ‘unfair [...]
SEOUL, July 8 (Korea Bizwire) – Hypermarkets, which offer a wide range of products under one roof, once prospered in Korea. Recently, however, sales growth has stagnated with a rapid change in consumer behavior. According to industry watchers, hypermarkets in Korea anticipated high growth this year, following poor performance in 2015 from widespread public fear [...]
SEOUL, May 2 (Korea Bizwire) — The Korean government announced that it will re-examine potential health damages to the respiratory system and other organs from humidifier disinfectants. The Ministry of Environment’s Humidifier Disinfectant Investigations Committee revealed that it will study the possibility of rhinitis, bronchitis, and other potential non-pulmonary damages resulting from humidifier disinfectants, and [...]
SEOUL, Dec.3 (Korea Bizwire) – While sales of domestic beer are declining at large supermarkets, foreign beer sales are rising rapidly. According to Emart, a large retailer, sales of domestic canned beer and PET bottled beer from January to November fell 2.2 percent and 6.4 percent respectively compared to the same period last year, but [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 2 (Korea Bizwire) – As consumer interest in eating healthy food is growing, eggs that are produced in a ‘natural’ way by free-range chickens instead of by chickens in chicken coops have been in high demand. However, it turns out that many consumers have been fooled, as a lot of those eggs were [...]
SEOUL, Sept. 10 (Korea Bizwire) – As Homeplus has changed ownership from England’s Tesco to the all-Korean MBK Partners, the company seems to be planning an aggressive revamp of its business practices with a focus on improvements. This could lead to severe competition in the industry. Considering the past, MBK might try to elevate the [...]
SEOUL, Sept. 8 (Korea Bizwire) — A consortium led by Seoul-based private equity fund MBK Partners clinched a 7.2 trillion won (US$5.98 billion) deal to acquire U.K.-based retail giant Tesco Plc‘s Korean unit, marking the nation’s largest takeover deal. MBK said it struck the stock purchase agreement with Tesco in Hong Kong a week after [...]
SEOUL, August 3 (Korea Bizwire) – A police investigation has discovered that the unauthorized usage of Homeplus mobile gift cards was the result of malicious action on the part of Chinese hackers, and not duplication issues caused by computing errors. The cybercrime investigation department of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency revealed that they have placed three [...]