Lotte Group has hired Kim Sang-hyun, former vice president of market rival Homeplus, to lead Lotte Shopping, which controls all the group’s retail business, officials said Thursday. The group’s hotel department will be led by Ahn Se-jin, former CEO of the Korean restaurant chain Nolboo. Kim Gyo-hyun, former head of Lotte Chemical, was promoted to vice president in recognition of his achievements in restoring the fortunes of the group’s chemical business to pre-pandemic

Tech giant’s chief strategist Cho Joo-wan will double as CEO

Starting Saturday, some 260 Sakhalin Koreans -- ethnic Koreans who were forced to relocate to the far-eastern Russian island by their Japanese colonizers during World War II -- are set to arrive in their ancestral homeland, the Foreign Ministry said Thursday.  The repatriation is in accordance with legislation that took effect in January, which expanded the eligibility criteria for relocation and financial support from the South Korean government for Sakhalin Koreans.  Previously,

Dunamu, the operator of cryptocurrency exchange Upbit, said Wednesday that it sold its first NFT art: two paintings by the famous Korean pop artist Jang Koal. The first art piece, “Mirage Cat 3,” started its bidding price from 0.0416 bitcoins, worth 2.8 million won ($2,350), and was sold on Wednesday on the Upbit NFT Beta platform to a bidder who had offered 3.5098 bitcoins, or about 240 million won, the company said. The nonfungible token, digital counterparts of real-world asse

MBC’s upcoming global audition program “Teenage Girls” is set to premiere on Sunday, with scores of contestants competing to form a seven-member girl group with the potential of making it on the Billboard charts. Viewers will see 83 trainees from South Korea, Japan, China and other countries display entertainment skills such as singing, dancing and rapping. The trainees will be split across four categories based on age. MBC teamed up with Naver and Han Dong-chul, who produc

JB Financial Group said on Thursday it has established an integrated big data platform which brings together the data of all of its affiliates and uses artificial intelligence technology to offer customized service. The “data hub” converges the financial data of affiliates and public data, and applies the group’s internal cloud technology to allow data analysis from an integrated perspective, JB Financial said. Using the data hub, affiliates of JB Financial can analyze custom

The Korean Federation of Community Credit Cooperatives will hold a joint webinar with its counterpart in Thailand on Friday under the theme “The Role of Financial Cooperatives and Future Directions.” The webinar is designed to discover the value of financial cooperatives in the two countries and seek ways to cooperate, the KFCC said. Students and officials at cooperatives as well as participants from Myanmar, Laos, Fiji and Uganda will take part in the three-hour webinar. The semin

SEJONG -- The number of paid jobs for South Koreans in their 30s has declined for a seventh consecutive quarter. This could indicate a lack of job security for the core working age bracket, despite recent improvement in hiring indexes for other age groups. Statistics Korea said Thursday that the tally for salaried jobs increased by 681,000 on-year for all age groups in the second quarter. By age, the figure decreased only among those aged between 30-39. Those in their 60s and older topped the

Samsung Biologics and Boston-based biotech firm GreenLight Biosciences have teamed up to help make COVID-19 vaccines more accessible to people in poor countries, especially in Africa, the Korean pharmaceutical company said Thursday.  Under a contract manufacturing deal signed earlier in the day, Samsung Biologics will produce drug substances for GreenLight’s messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccine candidate.  The drugmaking unit of Samsung Group said it is adding new production facilit

Country sees yet another record number of COVID-19 hospitalizations

A subcommittee of the South Korean National Assembly’s defense committee reached a standstill in its deliberations on changes to the Military Service Act, the so-called BTS law, Thursday. The subcommittee discussed whether the country should grant exemptions from military service to pop artists who have helped elevate its global standing. The bill, if passed, would allow K-pop stars to work in their field for 34 months under an alternative program instead of undertaking active-duty servic

The following article was contributed by the Embassy of Oman in Seoul. — Ed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Sultanate of Oman will mark the 51st National Day of the Renaissance, Nov. 18. The event comes around at a time when Omanis ponder about the achievements made so far and brace for further accomplishments, with firm resolve, under the astute leadership of His Majesty Sultan Haitham Bin Tarik who pledged to hold high the banner of the Rene

The Boyz on Thursday shared a timetable for celebrating their fourth debut anniversary with a batch of photographs. 　 Each of the 11 members posed for individual shots as athletes in different sports, ranging from soccer and hockey to shooting and archery, as part of its forthcoming season’s greeting campaign named “Athlete Club.” 　 The band will host an in-person concert, named “The B-Zone,” Dec. 3-5, to mark the anniversary. It has been close to three years sinc