LG Uplus, one of the nation's top telecom carriers, on Sunday unveiled a new brand slogan “Growth Leading AX Company" to accelerate innovation centering on the artificial intelligence transformation, referred to as AX. The company said the latest announcement came during an internal online session held on Friday to look back on its first quarter performance and share future business directions and plans. During the meeting, CEO Hwang Hyeon-sik noted that it became necessary to

Technology May 19, 2024

Hybe, the K-pop giant housing BTS, has become the first Korean entertainment firm to be designated a conglomerate by the country’s antitrust regulator, as its assets swelled big enough to fulfill the same tougher obligations as other large business groups. The Fair Trade Commission included Hybe along with five other firms in the list of conglomerates Tuesday, thanks to the boy band's enormous popularity and profitability alongside the agency’s active mergers and acquisitions

Industry May 15, 2024

Regardless of the ongoing diplomatic brouhaha, many industry watchers expect Naver to divest its stake in the 50:50 joint venture with SoftBank that controls the Line messenger app and Yahoo Japan. The issue is how much cash it could secure from the stake sale and its business impact in the future. Naver and SoftBank own 50 percent each in A Holdings, which controls almost 65 percent shares in LY Corp., the merged entity of Line and Yahoo Japan in 2019. The market cap of LY Corp. is estimated at

Technology May 14, 2024

Chinese e-commerce giants AliExpress and Temu signed a product safety agreement with Korea's Fair Trade Commission on Monday in the hopes of ensuring and protecting Korean consumers from harmful products being distributed and sold here through their platforms. The agreement marks the first of its kind signed by an overseas online platform operator in Korea regarding product safety. Particularly, Temu's involvement is noteworthy as this is the first time the company signed such an agree

Industry May 13, 2024

LG Innotek on Monday renewed its commitment to nurturing the automotive lighting business as its key growth driver. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the commercialization of Nexlide, the parts maker’s flexible three-dimensional lighting brand for vehicles. The module-based lighting products boast brighter, clearer and more uniform light emission. Starting with the Nexlide-A in 2014, the Nexlide-M began mass production in the first quarter of this year. A total of nine types of Nexli

Technology May 13, 2024

China’s Roborock, the popular robot vacuum cleaner brand, has become a rare success story on the home turf of Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics. Despite the dominance of the two Korean firms in the nation’s home appliance market, when it comes to the burgeoning robot cleaner market, the Chinese runner-up has maintained its top position over the past four years. Last month, Roborock released its latest flagship model, the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra, which is capable of both vacuuming

Technology May 12, 2024

The Science Ministry on Friday expressed regret over the Japanese government’s pressure on Naver to shed its ownership stakes in the popular messaging app Line, hinting at "strong and stern" measures if necessary. “The Seoul government's firm position is that we’ll ensure Korean companies, including Naver, are not subject to any unreasonable measures related to overseas business and overseas investment,” Second Vice Science Minister Kang Do-hyun told report

Technology May 10, 2024

Naver Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Korea's IT giant Naver, said Friday it has teamed up with Philippine fiber optic internet provider Converge ICT Solutions to speed up digital transformation in the Southeast Asian country. Under the deal, the two sides agreed to collaborate to discuss ways to leverage Naver’s expertise to deliver innovative cloud solutions for the specific needs of Filipino customers. Converge is the fastest-growing broadband provider in the Philippines with a f

Technology May 10, 2024

South Korea is projected to account for nearly 20 percent of global semiconductor production in 2032, reaching an all-time high in output, a US report showed on Thursday. Asia’s fourth-largest economy is predicted to take up 19 percent of global chip production eight years later, according to a report by the Semiconductor Industry Association, in partnership with the Boston Consulting Group. The report evaluated that Korea invested in the development of the semiconductor industry from the

Technology May 9, 2024

Takeshi Idezawa, CEO of the Tokyo-based LY Corp., the operator of the messaging app Line, said Wednesday that the company has requested its key shareholder Naver to sell stakes in an apparent move to cut the Korean firm’s control over its management. The decision comes as Naver is under growing pressure from the Japanese government to shed its ownership in Line, the popular app the Korean firm has nurtured over the past 13 years. Currently, almost 70 percent of the Japanese population is k

Industry May 8, 2024

Tech firms have joined forces both domestically and globally to take on US chip giant Nvidia in the AI chip sector, which has enjoyed a near monopoly in the burgeoning market. An increasing number of global Big Tech companies are building their own AI ecosystems amid expectations for continuous growth in the sector, according to experts on Tuesday. While Nvidia has teamed up with SK hynix and TSMC to further strengthen its technical leadership in high-bandwidth memory chips, other tech firms are

Technology May 7, 2024

Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics made a mockery of its rival Apple on social media last week, after some iPhone users came forward complaining that their alarms had failed to go off. In a post on Instagram, Samsung UK shared a dog meme alongside text that reads "Rest assured our alarms go off.” It also wrote, “Samsung users woke up on time today.” According to industry sources, some iPhone users recently complained on social media, including TikTok, of inconveniences

Technology May 6, 2024

Korea’s antitrust regulator has approved IT giant Kakao’s acquisition of a 39.87 percent stake in SM Entertainment, the K-pop agency behind EXO, aespa and NCT, contingent upon the implementation of corrective measures. The Fair Trade Commission said Thursday that it imposed two forms of corrective measures to address concerns that the merger of Kakao, a major IT company that owns both the music streaming service Melon and SM Entertainment, may pose a threat to competition in the loca

Industry May 2, 2024

Marking the 140th anniversary this year, the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry or KCCI, the nation's largest business lobby, hosted the Global Business Networking Night event in Seoul on Tuesday to further promote foreign investment and attract global companies to nurture the country as the business hub in Asia. “Starting with tonight's event, the KCCI will further strengthen its role as an economic and diplomatic platform,” KCCI Chair Chey Tae-won, who also serves as

Industry May 1, 2024

SK Telecom, Korea's largest wireless carrier by the number of subscribers, said Tuesday it aims to introduce a large language model specializing in telecom-related terms as early as June. The upcoming telecom-specific LLM is developed from general-purpose LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude. SK Telecom joined hands with global Big Tech firms including OpenAI and Anthropic to develop the LLM. Telco-specific LLMs are more adjusted to the telecommunications domain and better at understanding use

Technology April 30, 2024