ZZQC International Business Group, China's major investment firm, will likely take part in Cityscape Korea 2017, the nation's largest international real estate trade show, signaling that it is moving into the Korean market in earnest. According to the secretariat office of Cityscape Korea on August 8, ZZQC will set up a booth in the Korea Economic Daily-sponsored exhibition and send five top executives to meet local developers and public agency officers. During the trade show period, the C...

Daehan Shipbuilding, a mid-sized shipbuilder in Haenam, South Jeolla Province, is seeing its order booking volume rise fast. During the first half of this year, the company won orders that exceeded twice the annual goal. Unlike any other shipyards that stopped operations of docks, Daehan has secured orders worth more than two years. It is also increasing hiring, which is rare in the shipbuilding industry. Daehan clinched deals of building 14 "Aframax" ships (115,000 metric tons) during the fi...

President Moon Jae-in said on August 15, "Another war in the Korean Peninsula must be resisted at any cost. Military action on the Korean Peninsula can only be decided by South Korea and no one else can decide to take military action without the consent of South Korea." In congratulatory remarks in celebration of the 72nd Liberation Day in Seoul's Sejong Culture Center, he said in relation to the North Korean missile crisis, "The government will do everything it can to prevent a war with Nort...

The Moon Jae-in government has decided to pay 100,000 won (US$88) a month per child younger than 5 years beginning in July next year. The basic pension payment of 200,000 won currently given to low-income (lower 70% of income scale) senior citizens older than 65 years will be increased to 250,000 won from April next year.  The additional expenses for these two items will be 13.4 trillion won for children's allowance and 29.5 trillion won for senior citizen pension payments for the next...

Samsung Engineering said on August 16 that it won two petrochemical power generation projects worth 550 billion won jointly with PTT Public Company Ltd., a Thai state-run oil company. This has been less than a week since the Korean company announced a large-scale oil refinery building project in Oman worth more than 1 trillion won. The project calls for building a petrochemical plant and an electricity generation plant in Rayong, Thailand's largest industrial city 150 kilometers southeast of ...

LG Siltron, a wafer maker acquired early this year by SK Group, held an extraordinary shareholders meeting on August 17 and decided to change its name to SK Siltron. Back in January this year, SK Corp., SK Group's holding company, decided to purchased a 51-percent stake in LG Siltron at 620 billion won and has since completed merger tests with competition authorities in major countries including China. SK Siltron was ranked No. 4 in the world last year in the 300-mm wafer area. The semiconduc...

Hyundai Merchant Marine is pushing forward with a plan to attract an investment of up to 1 trillion won from BlackRock, the world's largest asset management firm. According to investment banking industry and shipping industry sources on August 20, the company is currently in talks with BlackRock to bring in an investment of 600 billion won to 1 trillion won. The investment will be made in the form of BlackRock taking part in a capital increase by Hyundai. Once the deal is successful, the equi...

Samsung Electronics said on August 20 that its Samsung Pay service has surpassed the 10-trillion-won milestone in payment volume within two years since launch. Introduced in August 2015, Samsung Pay exceeded the 1-trillion-won level in August last year. Since that time on, the service volume quadrupled for one year's time. An official with Samsung Electronics said, "The volume of out online transactions has taken off since last year, accounting for 30 percent of the total online transactions....

The volume of home mortgage loans made out by commercial banks is falling at a rapid rate after the government's measure to keep the housing marketing from overheating on August 2. According to figures made public by the nation's top-five banks including Kookmin, Shinhan, Woori, KEB Hana, and Nonghyup on August 21, the balance of home mortgage loans as of August 18 was 368,370.2 billion won, up by 1,834.3 billion won from the end of July (366,535.9 billion won). In monthly rate, this is up ...

LG International will expand its palm oil operations in Indonesia for the first time in six years. This is a move for the trading company to focus more on the food resource business. The company recently broke the ground for the palm oil plant. It plans to complete the construction by the end of the first half of next year and start producing 110,000 tons of palm oil a year. This is an increase of 30,000 tons from the current capacity. Back in 2009, LG International jumped into the food re...

The Thailand unit of Samsung Life, which has continued its presence in the Southeast Asian country even after most Korean financial service firms had withdrawn, turned to the black for the first time in 20 years. Samsung Life said on August 22 that Samsung Life Thailand's net profit for the second quarter was 340 million won. Given the Thai subsidiary is doing quite well in the third quarter, it is expected to post a positive net profit for the whole year. Back in 1997 Samsung Life establishe...

LG Electronics said on August 23 that it would establish an electric car parts plant in Hazel Park, outside Detroit, Michigan, by investing about US$25 million. The proposed plant will be built in a 215,000-square-meter site within the first quarter of 2018. The company will produce battery packs for electric cars, with plans to expand the line-ups to other electric car components in the future. LG explained that the locational decision was based on the proximity to the Vehicle Components N...

The household debt balance has rapidly increased to approach 1,400 trillion won (US$1.24 trillion) as of the end of June this year. It is estimated the balance may have surpassed the 1,400-trillion-won level by mid-August. As the amount of household debt reaches 90 percent of the gross domestic products (1,637 trillion won at the end of last year), economists began warning the high debt level may pose an obstacle to further growth.According to the Bank of Korea on August 23, the balance of house...

This year's tourism balance of payments is estimated to surpass US$15 billion. This is up more than 40 percent of $10.8 billion recorded in 2007 in the wake of the global financial crisis. According to the Bank of Korea, the tourism balance of payments in the month of June this year was a deficit of $1.39 billion. The cumulative deficit for the first six months of the year has been $7.74 billion, the second all-time highest after the second half of 2007. Last year, the tourism spending by K...

Despite the record-high results, the R&D investment level of the nation's petrochemical industry is still miserably low. According to industry sources on August 28, the amount of R&D investment of Lotte Chemical, which achieved a record-high sales revenue of 7,849.4 billion won in the first half, fell short of 44.5 billion won. This is only 0.57 percent of the total sales. Even last year when the company posted the highest operating profit (2,547.8 billion won) among all petrochemical...

SK Engineering & Construction has won a large-scale petrochemical plant project in Thailand. The company said on August 29 that it clinched a deal worth US$210 million to build polyol plant within the Hemaraj industrial zone in Thailand's Rayong. This followed news that the company signed a $1.6-billion project to modernize an oil refinery in Iran earlier this month. The plant, located 150 kilometers southeast of Thailand's capital Bangkok, is commissioned jointly by PTT Global Chemical, ...

Global furniture and home furnishing company IKEA has earned 365 billion won in sales for the past one year in Korea. The company said that it would open a total of six stores in Korea starting with a second store in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, followed by Yongin (Gyeonggi) and Gyeryong (South Chungcheong) by 2020. Andre Schmidtgall, president of IKEA Korea, said on August 29 in a press briefing held in Bread Comma in Seoul's Yeonnam-dong that his company's sales revenue for the 2017 fiscal ye...

The volume of welfare budget set aside by local governments has surpassed the 50-trillion-won level for the first time in history to 53 trillion won (US$46.9 billion). This is 59 percent higher than what it was five years ago. According to the 2017 Statistical Yearbook published by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety on September 4, the aggregate welfare budget of local government for the first six months of the year was 52,601.4 billion won, up 6.2 percent (3,081.7 billion won) from the ...

Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering signed on September 4 a contract to build five very-large crude carriers bigger than 300,000 tons with Hyundai Merchant Marine. The price tag for the deal is estimated at 470 billion won, with an option to build five more. At the signing ceremony, Daewoo Shipbuilding CEO Jung Sung-leep and Hyundai Merchant Marine CEO Yoo Chang-Keun were in attendance with other executives. With the latest ship orders, Hyundai plans to upgrade its fleets. Earlier ...

The market value of LG Group companies has moved up to the third place after overtaking that of Hyundai Motor Group following Samsung and SK. Hyundai Motor lost out to LG after giving away the second place to SK Group in June this year. According to the Korea Exchange on September 6, the aggregate market capitalization (including that of preferred stocks) of LG Group's 16 publicly listed affiliates was 96,883 billion won as of the end of September 5. On the same day, the value of 16 publicly ...

POSCO Daewoo has opened Lotte Hotel Yangon on September 8 in Myanmar's capital Yangon. The five-star hotel, located near Inya Lake in the central business district of the city, consists of a 15-story hotel building (343 rooms) and a 29-story long-term serviced apartment building (315 rooms). POSCO Daewoo is responsible for the overall management while Lotte Hotels and Resorts taking charge of daily management. On the opening day, Myanmar Minister of Hotels and Tourism Ohn Maung, Chief Ministe...

As international coal prices are on the rise, Hanwha Chemical's prospect is getting brighter. That's because the Korean company uses naphtha to produce polyvinyl chloride (PVC) while its rivals in China are largely based on coal, which will make it more price competitive vis-a-vis the Chinese chemical producers. According to Korea Resources Corp. and chemical industry sources on September 10, the freight-on-board (FOB) price of bituminous coal out of the Chinese port of Qinhuangdao was US$95....

LG International Corp., Korea's leading general trading company, is set to kick off the operation of a cement factory in Myanmar for which it has invested for two years. This is part of the company's strategy to preempt the rapidly growing Myanmar market by becoming the first general trading firm to build a cement plant in the Southeast Asian nation. According to industry sources on September 11, LG International is currently making a pilot run of the cement plant in the erstwhile reclusive c...

Park Sam-koo, chairman of Kumho Asiana Group, will submit a self-rescue plan for Kumho Tire that includes the sell-off of Chinese plants to the creditors by September 12. In addition, he will sell off a 4.4-percent stake in Daewoo Engineering & Construction worth 130 billion won while asking executives to return their pays as part of the restructuring measures. An industry official familiar with the matter said on September 11, "Kumho Asiana will soon deliver to the creditors a high-inten...

The Daesan petrochemical industrial zone in Seosan, South Chungcheong Province, will transform into an advanced chemical industrial complex. The nation's major petrochemical companies may invest up to 10 trillion won in this area. On September 14, S-Oil, Lotte Chemical, Hanwha Total, South Chungcheong provincial government, and Seosan city gathered in Lotte World Tower and signed a memorandum to create a Daesan specialized industrial complex. Currently the area is home to large petrochemical ...

Private-sector power generators are complaining mightily about the government's pressure on them to switch coal-fired power plants they are building into ones based on liquefied natural gas. That's largely because the government is mum about the sunk cost and other costs to retrofit the plants estimated to be as high as 2.6 trillion won. According to private-sector power generation industry sources on September 17, the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy requested to POSCO Energy, SK Gas,...

Chief executives of the nation's leading companies like Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and LG Display have made a request to the government to relieve the problem of labor shortage in the area of semiconductor and display. Kwon Oh-hyun, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, said on September 18 in a discussion session held in Kensington Hotel in Seoul's Yoido presided over by Minister of Trade, Industry, and Energy Baek Woon-gyu, "Skilled workers are in short supply in fast-growing industries...

MBI, a Korean manufacturer specializing in making transmissions, will build an electric car plant in Hanoi, Vietnam, jointly with local firm N&G Group. The two companies will invest a total of US$1 billion for the next seven years. The companies said on September 21 that the heads of the two companies signed an agreement to establish a joint venture called Viko Motors in South Hanoi next month. Earlier in June this year, MBI was promised by the Vietnamese government and the Hanoi city gov...

The government has decided to give support to North Korea worth US$8 million in programs helping its vulnerable people including children and pregnant women indirectly through international organizations. It, however, has not decided when to start sending money and exactly how. This is interpreted as a choice to deflect criticism that it is undertaking an aid project at a time when North Korea is causing an international storm by launching a series of missile tests. On September 21, the gover...

As the government pronounced illegal on the practice of companies relying on subcontract workers for a long time such as the cases in Paris Baguette and Mando-Hella, the whole industry in shock. This is not just restricted to manufacturers but is spread to services and the food franchise industry as well. The corporate sector expected on September 24 that companies like Tous Les Jours, Samsung Electronics service centers, and LG U+ will likely face the same problem any time soon after the Min...

As Korea and China are set to improve their relationship that was rocked by the controversy over the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system, Korea's tourism and duty-free shopping industries are raising their hopes of better days.The tourism industry believes that the Chinese government's group tour ban to Korea would be relaxed soon. A travel agency in Hebei posted an Internet ad recently for a group tour program to Korea in November at the price of 1,4...

"Realty Expo Korea 2018 to Unveil in Sept. This Year   Organized by Korea’s No.1 Business News Provider Korea Economic Daily FIABCI KOREA to Sponsor Jointly... Interest of 67 Member Countries Heightened REK 2018 Organizers Start Taking Applications... Foreign Exhibitors to Get Additional Discounts   Realty Expo Korea (REK), the global festival for real estate professionals in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, will be with you for three days between September 19th and 2...

Over the years, Poland has worked to position itself as a strategic partner to Ukraine and its gateway to the European Union. One of these initiatives appears to be paying dividends. The efforts of the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE) to attract new fore...

The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (“SEHK”), wholly owned subsidiary of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, has published a consultation paper last Friday 22 September 2017 which proposed changes to the Main Board Listing Rules (“MB Rules”) and the Rules...

China’s securitisation has been developing rapidly. To date, China’s securitisation market is already the largest in Asia and second largest in the world. Our structured finance partner Kingsley Ong (who is also the Secretary-General of ...

In May 2017, David Webb, an activist investor and former director of the Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing Limited, issued a report titled "The Enigma Network: 50 stocks not to own". This report mapped out a complex web of cross-shareholdings between ...

Introduciton On 5 December 2017, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) published its proposals for a revised UK Corporate Governance Code. The Code is shorter, building on the FRC’s...

The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited (the “Stock Exchange”) is conducting further public consultation on the listing of companies from emerging and innovative sectors.  The consultation paper published on 23 February 2018 (the &l...

On 19 March 2018, a draft Agreement on the withdrawal of the UK from the EU was published. The Agreement’s objective is to set out the arrangements for the withdrawal of the UK from the EU. Amongst these arrangements are the transitional provi...

“Not a Dirty Word”: ESMA revisits the impact of its Opinion on delegation for UK managers if there is a “hard” Brexit In the wake of the draft Agreement on the withdrawal of the UK from the EU, a speech by Steven Maijoor, th...