Although the nation’s top 10 chaebol owners own tiny stakes in their business empires, their shady cross-shareholding structure allows their families to wield absolute power through affiliates, recent data found Thursday. According to Chaebul.com, an online conglomerate tracker, their average ownership stake was just 0.25 percent. Including the stakes owned by other family members, the figure increased to a mere 0.49 percent.Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Kun-hee, who has been hospitalized sin

SK hynix, South Korea’s top chip maker, said Wednesday it has agreed with U.S.-based SanDisk to end their ongoing legal battle and to extend ties on patent use. In March last year, SanDisk filed a lawsuit against SK hynix in the U.S., claiming that its former researchers had moved to the Korean chip maker and leaked confidential business information in 2008. Following the agreement, SK hynix will pay an undisclosed amount in patent fees to SanDisk and supply dynamic random access memory, or DRAM

Samsung Electronics said Monday it would create a 100 billion won ($85 million) fund for employees who had suffered from incurable diseases, including leukemia, while working at its manufacturing plants for semiconductors and displays. “Even though the exact causal relationship (of their illness) has not yet been verified, we will make all-out efforts to solve the issue promptly for the victims and their families,” the company said in a statement. Samsung has continued the compensation talks wit

LG Display said Thursday it would make a fresh investment of 1.05 trillion won ($900 million) into the production of sixth-generation flexible OLED panels at its plant in Gumi, North Gyeongsang Province. The company said it aims to produce 7,500 units of the futuristic display per month from 2017. By producing larger panel sheets, the company hopes to more than quadruple the plant’s production efficiency.LG Display, the world’s largest display-maker by sales, has invested more than 14 trillion w

Samsung Electronics said Wednesday it planned to pay a combined 14.2 billion won ($12.3 million) in incentives to its 103 chip suppliers in the first half of this year.The Korean tech giant said it was the highest ever amount going to the largest ever number of recipient companies. The company has offered suppliers incentives every year since 2010 as part of its shared-growth efforts with small and medium-sized firms. The recipient companies are decided based on their performance in production,

LG Electronics on Wednesday denied rumors that U.S. search giant Google was mulling to acquire a 35 percent stake, worth 2.5 trillion won ($2.2 billion), in the company.According to the rumors, Google would acquire the stake in a block deal, but would not participate in the management despite becoming the largest shareholder. Inspite of the company’s denial, LG’s share price soared 14 percent in the morning. The closing price was 43,650 won, up 3.07 percent from the previous day. The share price

Military prosecutors sought capital punishment for an Army sergeant on Tuesday for killing and wounding a dozen unarmed fellow soldiers in a shooting rampage at a military outpost near the tensely-guarded eastern border with North Korea last year.The 23-year-old conscript, surnamed Lim, detonated a grenade and sprayed a hail of bullets in June last year in the military outpost of the 22nd Infantry Division stationed near the east-coastal front line, killing five comrades and wounding seven other