The financial watchdog is expected to wrap up its delayed punishment of top executives at KB Financial Group that have been held responsible for a string of irregularities and scandals as early as this week, an official said Sunday.“The punishment against 95 executives and employees at KB Financial Group and Kookmin Bank is expected to be complete this month. The level of the punishment may be determined at an upcoming meeting on Thursday,” said an official at the Financial Supervisory Service.G

South Korea saw its global ranking in the high-speed wireless Internet penetration rate drop one notch in December last year from six months earlier, data showed Sunday.South Korea’s high-speed wireless Internet penetration rate came to 103.8 percent as of December, ranking sixth among the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to the data by the Paris-based club of advanced economies.The figure represents a one-spot drop from six months earlier, accor

LG Uplus, a South Korean mobile carrier, said Thursday that it had finished developing telecommunication networks at base camps and offices of a local construction company carrying out projects in the Middle East.The company said it had established enterprise Internet lines for the builder’s camps in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Libya and Kuwait, marking the first time it has provided the service for a client in the region.It worked with Epsilon, a Hong Kong-based IT outsourcing company, to d

South Korean financial companies such as banks and credit card firms will have to come up with a new business model to counter Kakao’s soon-to-launch financial transaction service, Woori Finance Research Institute said.The most-used mobile messenger’s Bank Wallet Kakao, or KaTalk Bank, which is expected to launch in September, will have a limited impact on the financial services sector as it only allows users to transfer money or purchase online goods of up to 100,000 won ($97) a day.However, Ka

Korean public research university KAIST said Wednesday that it would hold a cultural festival at its main campus in Daejeon with Asia’s top science universities until Aug. 9.The three-day event, called the ASPIRE League E-Olympics, will invite students from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, China’s Tsinghua University and Japan’s Tokyo Institute of Technology. ASPIRE stands for Asian Science and Technology Pioneering Institutes of R

The Korea Communications Commission said Monday that it would deregulate rules governing terrestrial broadcast advertising in line with efforts to help the saturated network advertising market and boost ultrahigh-definition content production.South Korea currently regulates the amount of time and the type of commercials broadcasters can show between TV programs and station breaks as a means to control their influence on the public.However, the KCC said it would revise this to regulate only the t

Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s top maker of smartphones, said Thursday its second-quarter net profit fell 19.5 percent from a year earlier as its mainstay handset business suffered from rising competition in the global market.Net income came to 6.25 trillion won ($6.1 billion) in the April-June period, compared with 7.77 trillion won a year earlier, the company said in a regulatory filing. Sales fell 8.89 percent on-year to 52.35 trillion won in the second quarter. Its operating profit cam