Kia Motors, a sister company of Hyundai Motor, is aiming to sell 4 million vehicles globally by 2030, with half of them being eco-friendly models, the company said on Thursday. The carmaker will expand the portion of electric vehicles and hybrids in overall sales from the current 17 percent to 52 percent by 2030. For markets with state-supportive policies for EVs –- Korea, North America, Europe...

Pokemon Bread, an iconic pastry series with kids of the 1990s, has been flying off the shelves since its return last week. Manufacturer SPC Samlip said Thursday, it had sold 1.5 million of the rolls over the previous week, six times more than the first week sales of the company’s average for a new product. The key to success lies in tapping into millennials’ nostalgic tendencies. Released in 1...

Seoul-based joint venture Ericsson-LG is also testing its newest equipment with Korean telecom carriers. According to Lee Young-jo, vice president at Ericsson-LG, the deployment of a new antenna is expected to kick off in the second quarter. “A telco would have been forced to buy two outdated pieces of equipment to (use) two separate slots, and this would have been a cost burden on the telco,” ...

The presidential election campaign committee of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea is keen on interpreting the effects of the merger deal announced from the opposition with less than 24 hours to go before early voting was due to start at 6 a.m. on Friday. Campaign staff members for the ruling party's candidate Lee Jae-myung insist the effects of the candidacy merger will be limited, and expert...

Samsung Electronics said Thursday that its next-generation memory chip set a world record on speed. According to the South Korean tech giant, its LPDDR5X memory chip operated at 7.5 gigabits per second, the fastest speed among memory chips in the market. Short for low power double data rate 5X, the LPDDR5X chip performed at the record speed on Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon mobile platform. Unvei...

BARCELONA, Spain -- LG U+ will export virtual reality content to Zain Group, a mobile carrier in the Middle East with more than 50 million users, in its effort to take initiative in the burgeoning global XR market. During a press conference held at the Mobile World Congress 2022 in Barcelona on Wednesday, local time, LG U+ CEO Hwang Hyun-sik said the South Korean telco will aim to sell content t...

The two leading opposition candidates for the presidency, Yoon Suk-yeol and Ahn Cheol-soo, merged their campaigns Thursday in a dramatic turn of events, just a day before early voting was to begin. In a joint statement, Yoon of the main opposition People Power Party and Ahn of the minor opposition People’s Party said they have decided to merge their campaigns in pursuit of regime change. Ahn wit...

The number of regulatory disclosure rule violations by firms in South Korea more than halved in 2021 from a year earlier amid stepped-up efforts to protect investors from misleading or false information, data showed Thursday. According to the data from the Financial Supervisory Service, there were 87 cases of regulatory filing rule violations last year, which involved a total of 73 listed and un...

Online shopping in South Korea rose 11.5 percent in January from a year earlier, with the proportion of transactions via mobile devices reaching a record high, amid the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, data showed Thursday. The value of online shopping transactions stood at 16.54 trillion won ($13.74 billion) in January, compared with 14.84 trillion won recorded a year earlier, according to the data...

South Korean banks' mortgage rates hit the highest level in about 10 years in January amid rising borrowing costs, central bank data showed Thursday. Banks' mortgage loan rate averaged 3.85 percent per year in January, 0.22 percentage point higher from a month earlier, according to the data from the Bank of Korea (BOK). It also marked the eighth consecutive month of on-month increase and the hi...

South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom Co. said Thursday its artificial intelligence service designed to help the visually impaired has won an award at the world's largest mobile show in Barcelona. The wireless carrier said the AI-based virtual service co-developed with local social venture group Tuat has received an award for Best Use of Mobile for Accessibility & Inclusion at the Mobile World C...

The armed conflict in Ukraine has led to a delay in talks among South Korea, the United States and Japan to arrange their in-person defense ministerial meeting, a Seoul official said Thursday. The three countries have been in talks to set up a meeting among Defense Minister Suh Wook and his U.S. and Japanese counterparts, Lloyd Austin and Nobuo Kishi, in line with an agreement at their phone tal...

Main opposition presidential candidate Yoon Suk-yeol leads his ruling party rival Lee Jae-myung in a hypothetical two-way race, according to polls conducted before Yoon merged candidacies with Ahn Cheol-soo of the minor People's Party. According to a survey conducted by Embrain Public from Tuesday to Wednesday, Yoon led Lee 45.9 percent to 45 percent in a hypothetical two-way race. The gap of 0....

Samsung Electronics Co.'s share in the smartphone chipset market dropped in the fourth quarter, research showed Thursday, amid efforts to restructure the company's smartphone portfolio strategy. The South Korean tech giant, which makes Exynos chipsets, accounted for four percent of the global shipments of smartphone application processor (AP) and system-on-chip (SoC) in the October-December peri...