SEOUL, Aug. 5 (Korea Bizwire) — With South Koreans spending more time at home due to tightened social distancing rules resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing number are replacing furniture and home decor with premium alternatives. The nation’s imports of lamps and lighting fixtures amounted to US$359.4 million in the first half of this [...]
SEOUL, Aug. 3 (Korea Bizwire) — A recent survey has revealed that the vast majority of South Korean adults are now drinking at home following the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Lotte Members Co., a membership service unit of retail conglomerate Lotte Group, conducted a survey of 2,000 men and women, 83.6 percent of whom [...]
SEOUL, Aug. 3 (Korea Bizwire) — The number of Seoulites who took a summer vacation last year almost halved compared to the 2019 level, primarily due to the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism conducted a survey of 1,931 Seoul citizens aged over 15 years of age, in which [...]
SEOUL, July 30 (Korea Bizwire) — For Kwon Ji-young, a 41-year-old office worker, traveling overseas has been an annual ritual that allows her to completely take a break from the heavy workload of her daily life. But since she canceled her planned 10-day trip to Austria in April last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, [...]
SEOUL, July 29 (Korea Bizwire) — When it comes to college students, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have been felt hardest by freshmen and sophomores — some of whom have never met their classmates, let alone gone to a school festival. One 20-year-old student at Incheon National University, west of Seoul, said he has [...]
SEOUL, July 23 (Korea Bizwire) — Despite the opening of the Tokyo Olympics right around the corner, Olympic marketing activities in the South Korean restaurant and food and beverage industries remain uncharacteristically tepid. This reflects that the sentiment that Olympic fever is not as strong as in the past due to the pandemic. Coca-Cola Beverage [...]
SEOUL, July 21 (Korea Bizwire) — It’s time to get ready for the summer holiday season, but shops in Myeongdong, a major shopping district in downtown Seoul, remain eerily quiet with “For Lease” signs attached to many storefronts along the main road. Long gone are the days when clerks at cosmetic shops promoted new products [...]
SEJONG, July 19 (Korea Bizwire) — The number of discouraged workers in South Korea hit a new monthly high in June amid the prolonged coronavirus pandemic, government data showed Monday. Asia’s fourth-largest economy had 583,000 discouraged workers, up 46,000 from a year earlier, according to the data from Statistics Korea. It was the largest tally [...]
SEOUL, July 16 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea plans to offer face masks and COVID-19 diagnostic kits to its citizens in Myanmar next week, the foreign ministry said Friday, amid a spike in new virus cases in the Southeast Asian country. The move followed reports that three South Korean citizens in Myanmar died recently after [...]
SEOUL, July 16 (Korea Bizwire) — The coronavirus pandemic is prompting consumers to stick to restaurants they’re used to frequenting, rather than looking for new places to eat. Local fintech firm Korea Credit Data studied credit card data collected from 700,000 vendors across the country to find that the use of credit cards at newly [...]