An executive from Indian carmaker Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. will come to South Korea this week to discuss and seek financial support from the main creditor bank of its local unit, SsangYong Motor Co., industry sources said Wednesday.SsangYong Motor confirmed Mahindra & Mahindra Managing Director Pawan Goenka will visit Seoul on Thursday but didn‘t provide any details about his schedule here. His visit comes ahead of the sport utility vehicle-focused carmaker’s planned board me

　Imported car sales in South Korea fell 6.1 percent in 2019 from a year earlier as Japanese brands were affected by a boycott amid trade tensions between Seoul and Tokyo, an industry association said.  　The number of newly registered foreign vehicles fell to 244,780 last year from the previous year’s 260,705, according to the Korea Automobile Importers & Distributors Association.  　Japanese carmakers such as Toyota Motor, Honda Motor and Nissan Motor saw their sales plunge 19

SK Telecom Co., South Korea's top mobile carrier, said Wednesday it aims to expand cooperation with Microsoft Corp. on console games.SKT said it plans to support the development of games for Xbox, a home video game console manufactured by Microsoft, by boosting investment and marketing activities.  To initiate the move, SKT said it participated in Microsoft's first Xbox Discovery Day event in Seoul. The event is a seminar organized by Microsoft for game developers and officials in the gamin

Woowa Youngmen, the operator of Baemin Riders -- a platform connecting restaurants and delivery drivers -- is facing opposition against its announcement to limit the weekly working hours of its delivery workers.Woowa Youngmens is a subsidiary of Woowa Brothers, the operator of Korea’s No. 1 food delivery application by market share. On Friday, it released a new work guideline, “2060 policy to prevent overworking,” to limit the workhours of drivers for Baemin Riders to 60 hours

SAN FRANCISCO -- It may not be music to the ears of small and medium-sized contract manufacturing organizations, but Samsung Biologics said Tuesday it plans to expand its current business to cover smaller volumes. “We decided to add sCMO to our service for client satisfaction, to keep providing support to our contract development clients who need small batches of drug substance for their subsequent clinical phase one trials,” said Regina Choi-Rivera, head of the sCMO business unit at

LG Electronics Inc. said Wednesday it will open a robotics lab in the United States to boost its competitiveness in bot technologies. LG's new robotics lab, set to open later this month in Boston, will allow its researchers to better check the latest robotics technologies. To beef up its robotics research, LG will also collaborate with Kim Sang-bae, a renowned robot scientist and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who has been leading MIT Biomimetics Robotics Lab since 2012. Using

GV80 has reasonable price, “Korean luxury” design

Yuhan-Kimberly, a Korean manufacturer of hygiene products, donated more than 5 million sanitary pads over the past four years, the company said Wednesday.The company’s donation is part of its “Cheer Up, Daughters” campaign to promote the rights of teens and the importance of hygiene for health, started in 2016 in partnership with the Korea Foundation for Women, a civic women’s group. According to the company, it donated 1.53 million pads in the first year, followed by 1 m

Samsung Electronics Co., South Korea's top tech firm, was relegated to second place in terms of chip sales in 2019, industry data showed Wednesday, due to the downturn in the memory chip market. Samsung's chip business logged $52.2 billion in revenue last year, down 29.1 percent from a year earlier, according to data from US-based research firm Gartner. The latest performance dragged Samsung down to the No. 2 spot in the global semiconductor market for the first time since 2016. Samsung's share

South Korea’s antitrust regulator said Wednesday that Netflix would make changes in their terms of use that are deemed unfair, including changing subscription plans and prices without consent, in accordance with instructions it made to the company. The company’s revised terms of use will take effect starting on Jan. 20. This is the first time the government has ordered such changes to be made by a global over-the-top streaming service.The Fair Trade Commission also signaled that it w

Ride-hailing platform Macaron Taxi’s operator KST Mobility said Wednesday it has received additional 5 billion won ($4.3 million) investment from NHN, capping the initial 18-billion-won investment required for its app-based service.  The two firms also agreed to collaborate on adding new services to the platform for user convenience, starting with NHN’s online payment system Payco.KST Mobility started its test run of the platform, titled “Series A,” in February last

Household expenditure in South Korea logged 656.85 trillion won ($570 billion) in the first three quarters of last year, of which 11.42 percent was spent on buying food and nonalcoholic beverages. The ratio of money spent on buying food items by households was the lowest since 11.39 percent in 2014.　(khnews@heraldcorp.com)

Samsung Electronics Co., South Korea's top electronics firm, ranked third in global wireless headset shipments last year, industry data showed Wednesday, though it trailed far behind its rival Apple Inc. Samsung shipped 7.4 million totally wireless headsets for a 6.9 percent market share in 2019, according to data from market tracker Strategy Analytics. TWS refers to Bluetooth stereo headsets that do not have a wire connecting the two earpieces.Apple was the dominant force in the TWS market with

Samsung Electronics Co. took the No. 2 spot in US patent grants last year, industry data showed Wednesday.The world's top smartphone and memory chip maker, received 6,417 US patent grants in 2019, up 11 percent from the previous year, according to the data from IFI Claims Patent Services, a provider of a top global patent data platform. Samsung has been the runner-up in IFI's US patents grants rankings since 2006.  IBM Corp. topped the list with 9,262 grants last year, up 2 percent from a y

Unionized workers at Kia Motors Corp. have tentatively agreed on the company's revised offerings in wage negotiations for the year of 2019, the company said Wednesday.Last month, Kia and its union reached a tentative wage and collective bargaining deal but 56 percent of 27,050 Kia workers voted down the deal. The union workers staged three rounds of partial strikes last month and held an eight-hour strike on Monday.  They demanded the company narrow an income gap with workers at bigger affi