Korean milk companies said Friday they are reviewing plans to increase the prices of their products, following the Korea Dairy Committee's recent decision to raise the price of raw milk by the largest rate in ten years. "We are going over plans to raise the price of our fresh milk products, as the price of raw milk outweighs all other factors that help determine the price of the end product, including pasteurization, labor and distribution costs and such," said an official from a

The number of transactions made by Vietnamese tourists in South Korea during the first half of the year showed the sharpest growth among other visitors, increasing by 468 percent on-year, Korean credit card issuer BC Card said Friday. The growth in Vietnamese tourists' transactions were significantly higher than those of all other foreign tourists, which stood at 358 percent. The data released by BC Card was based on the total number of credit card and debit card transactions made by 1.2

Incheon Airport said it has begun utilizing preregistered facial information to streamline the departure process for passengers from Friday. Dubbed the "facial recognition smart pass service," the newly launched service will allow passengers to quickly pass through the identification process at departure and boarding gates without having to show their passports and boarding passes to security personnel. The service is available at six departure gates and 16 boarding gates at Incheon Ai

SK Innovation Co. said Friday it turned to the red in the second quarter as falling oil prices and thinner margins hurt its profitability. The company logged an operating loss of 106.8 billion won ($83.2 million) in the April-June period, compared with the 2.32 trillion-won operating profit a year ago, the energy unit of SK Group said in a regulatory filing. Revenue fell 5.9 percent to 18.72 trillion won. It reported a net loss of 120.4 billion won, turning around from a profit of 1.34 trillion

South Korea's Hanwha Group has finalized the agreement with the Centre Pompidou in France to establish the museum's offshoot branch in Seoul, with the opening set for late 2025, the energy-to-defense conglomerate said Friday. The formal contract was signed Thursday, under which Hanwha is given the licensing rights to use the French museum's properties for four years upon the opening of the branch, the Centre Pompidou Hanwha Seoul, Hanwha said. The Centre Pompidou Hanwha Seoul will

KT&G, South Korea's dominant tobacco and ginseng company, said Thursday its chief executive and employees carried out voluntary work at a soup kitchen in Seoul to help homeless people and senior citizens bear the summer heat. KT&G CEO Baek Bok-in and 20 other executives and employees took part in serving food to homeless people and aged people living alone, at the meal center, according to the firm. “May the food that we have prepared become a strength to people who are suffer

Korean automaker logs record quarterly earnings again

Led by South Korea’s SK Telecom, a new global alliance has been formed as four major telecommunications firms from South Korea, Germany, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore join hands to expand cooperation in the artificial intelligence business. The nation’s No. 1 telecom company in terms of subscriptions said Thursday that it hosted the Global Telco AI Alliance CEO Summit, a hybrid event held both online and offline, in Seoul and gathered key executives of Deutsche Telekom, e&am

LG Electronics, a leading home appliance supplier, said Thursday it has achieved the highest second-quarter revenue in company history at 19.9 trillion won ($15.6 billion), overcoming the sluggish demand situation the world’s consumer appliance market is experiencing. Backed with overall growth in its business portfolios, especially automotive parts and electric vehicles, LG said it will expand investment and build new manufacturing facilities overseas. In a regulatory filing, the tech gia

South Korean trading company STX announced Thursday that it has inked a memorandum of understanding with the nation's largest commercial credit bureau NICE D&B to provide corporate information services on Trollygo, its business-to-business online trading platform which is set to be launched in the third quarter of this year. The signing event was held at NICE D&B’s headquarters in Mapo-gu, Seoul, on Wednesday, with top executives including STX CEO Park Sang-jun and NICE D&

KB Financial Group reclaimed its position as the top financial group in Korea with a net profit of 2.99 trillion won ($2.34 billion) in the first half, surpassing other players. The group's flagship KB Kookmin Bank also regained the leading bank title with a net profit of 1.85 trillion won in the same period. Although KB set aside more than 1.31 trillion won for bad debt reserves in the first half of 2023, the expansion of net interest income and robust profits from nonbanking businesses dr

Hyundai Elevator said Wednesday it has signed a memorandum of understanding with LG Electronics and KT in order to drive advancements in the applications of robotics and explore new business opportunities in the field of smart buildings. The signing ceremony was attended by Do Ik-han, vice president and head of the Service Business Division at Hyundai Elevator; Roh Kyu-chan, vice president and head of the Robot Business Division at LG Electronics; and Lee Sang-ho, vice president and head of the

Korean duo teams up with BMW, GM, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis to set up over 30,000 EV chargers across North America by 2030

Chip giant says it will further slash memory chip production to adjust market inventory, strengthen AI-related chips

By Jung Chang-lim In November 2022, the release of the conversational artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT by the US startup OpenAI caused a significant impact. Unlike existing models, ChatGPT demonstrated the ability to understand the context of language and engage in conversations that resembled interactions with humans. Moreover, it even ventured into the realm of human creativity. Within just two months of its launch, ChatGPT garnered overwhelming popularity, surpassing 100 million month