The author is an analyst of NH Investment & Securities. He can be reached at jaemin.ahn@nhqv.com. -- Ed. While the ad market downturn due to Covid-19 is inevitably to weigh upon NAVER’s earnings in 1H20, the firm’s efforts to turn crisis into opportunity should bear meaningful results from 2H20.Taki
JobKorea recently looked into last year’s business reports of the top 30 market cap companies and said on April 7 that the average age of their executives, 95.6 percent of whom are male, is 53 and 24.1 percent of the executives studied abroad.Specifically, those in their 50s account for 75.7 percent
YouTube, Netflix, Instagram and Facebook are dominating the online video service market of South Korea, in which Naver is the only local company among the top five.KT Group’s digital media lab Nasmedia recently released the result of this year’s Netizen Profile Research. In the survey that covered 2
The author is an analyst of Shinhan Investment Corp. She can be reached at mj1224@shinhan.com. -- Ed. Positive on COVID-19-sparked changes in consumption habitsFor the internet sector, we focus more on the positive impact of COVID-19 in terms of changing consumer habits towards “untact” (a portmante
The author is an analyst of NH Investment & Securities. He can be reached at jaemin.ahn@nhqv.com. -- Ed. The economic downturn due to Covid-19 is negatively influencing ad market conditions. Ad sales growth at Internet firms started to slow from February, which is likely to weigh on their short-term
The Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) dropped 4.19 percent to close at 1,954.77 points on March 9, showing a decline of over 4 percent for the first time since Oct. 11, 2018.On March 9 alone, the aggregate value of the stock market plunged by 57.5 trillion won and that of the Korea Securitie
The year of 2020 will be the first year of a U.S.-China digital finance war based on blockchain and cryptocurrency technology, SK Securities said in a recent report. The brokerage says that the two countries are stepping up efforts to preoccupy techfin using blockchain technology.“The United States
Naver's Japanese subsidiary LINE is accelerating the expansion of its new financial business. Following Singapore, LINE opened a cryptocurrency exchange in the United States.LINE announced on Feb. 25 that it has opened “Bitfront,” an exchange where people can trade cryptocurrencies with U.S. dol
Unionized workers at Samsung Display officially launched a labor union on Feb. 17.The labor union submitted a union establishment report to the Asan City government in South Chungcheong Province on the day. Under the current Trade Union Act, the establishment of a union only requires submission of a
Market research firm FnGuide said on Jan. 28 that 197 KOSPI-listed companies and 100 KOSDAQ-listed companies are expected to provide cash dividends equivalent to 26.65 percent and 22.46 percent of their net profits per share, respectively. In July last year, the National Assembly Budget Office annou
The utilization rate of social networking services (SNS) in Korea dropped for the first time in eight years in 2019, the Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI) said on Jan. 27.In a survey conducted last year, 47.7 percent of the 10,864 respondents at 4,583 households in Korea said t
Listed companies are expressing concerns over the recently revised enforcement decrees of the Commercial Act and the Capital Markets Act, which are scheduled to take effect next month.According to the former decree, the term of an outside director in a listed company cannot exceed six years and it i
Naver is believed to have surpassed 6 trillion won in annual sales in 2019 for the first time. Kakao is also estimated to have posted 3 trillion won in annual sales last year. The two leading Korean internet companies are thus believed to have achieved a new sales milestone in their company history.
As the South Korean market for easy payment services has grown close to three times in two years, the service providers are now moving to expand their businesses to overseas markets.They are planning to enable travelers to use their easy payment services without exchanging money, especially in Asian
The market capitalization gap between Korean conglomerates and their global competitors has widened.Samsung Electronics’ market capitalization reached US$284.5 billion on Dec, 31, up 37.6 percent (US$ 77.8 billion) from US$206.7 billion at the end of 2018. Apple's market cap, on the other hand,
Large Korean companies increased investment in research and development (R&D) by close to 4 trillion won this year compared to a year ago despite declines in sales. The share of R&D spending in sales rose 0.34 percentage point to exceed 3 percent.Industry tracker CEO Score released a report on Dec.
As Naver and SoftBank have signed the main contract for the integration of LINE and Yahoo! Japan, the birth of Asia's largest Internet company with more than 100 million users is close at hand.Naver announced that Z Holdings, a subsidiary of SoftBank and the parent company of Yahoo! Japan, a Jap
As global cloud service providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft (MS) are eyeing the Korean financial market, competition between local and foreign providers is expected to intensify in the cloud market.Korean cloud service providers, including KT, Naver Business Platform (NBP) an
A survey has found that Korea lags behind China and Japan in terms of the quality and quantity of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers.The Korea Economic Research Institute (KERI) under the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI) said on Dec. 15 that it has found that Korea’s human resources compe
The Korea Fair Trade Commission announced on Dec. 9 that it recently looked into 56 conglomerates, those include 49 led by owners, the 49 conglomerates have 1,801 subsidiaries, and at least one owner family member is registered as a director in 321 out of the 1,801 subsidiaries. It added that direct