By Koh Young-aah Seoul’s Gangnam area, on the southern side of the Han River, has emerged as a popular residential area for families of the country’s top 30 tycoons over the years, a research firm said in a report Wednesday. Seongbuk-dong and Hannam-dong, located in Gangbuk, north of the river, have historically been considered wealthy areas where most local conglomerate owners reside. The tre...

By Cho Ji-hyun LG Electronics announced its comeback Wednesday by getting back into the black, posting 13.15 trillion won ($12.19 billion) in sales and 130 billion won in operating profit for the first quarter of this year. In its quarterly earnings report, the company said total sales maintained a similar level to the same period last year, down 0.4 percent. However, its net loss during the te...

By Koh Young-aah Foreign retailers seeking to enter the Korean market should consider its unique traits and cultural differences to succeed, according to Richard Hwang, managing director of global commercial real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield’s Korean unit. “A lot of global retailers have experienced failure here because they had little understanding of the market before entering it....

South Korean engineers successfully tested the world’s first operational automatic docking system between two large ships off the country’s southeastern coast, a state-run science and technology university said Tuesday. The test carried out in Busan, 453 kilometers southeast of Seoul, is an integral part of the larger “mobile harbor” project that aims to make it possible to speed up the loading ...

Samsung Group, South Korea’s top conglomerate, will build green-energy industrial facilities from 2021 in a new town to be created on west coastal tidal flats, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) said Wednesday. Samsung signed a memorandum of understanding with the government to construct green-energy production facilities, a research institute and houses on a 11.5-square-kilometer plot in the Sae...

Few would question the “one-share, one-vote” rule as the basic principle behind corporate governance. Nothing would be wrong if the National Pension Service exercises its voting rights, mandated by the number of common shares it possesses, at a listed company’s meeting of shareholders. The National Pension Service is one of the largest institutional investors, which holds more than 5 percent of ...

Pressure is mounting on South Korea to resume dialogue with North Korea and withdraw opposition to resuming denuclearization talks in the absence of Pyongyang’s apology for its earlier unprovoked hostilities. As Winston Churchill famously said, jaw-jaw is always better than war-war. But what if the North Korean communists do not abandon the idea of war-war while in talks? North Korea has been kn...

The fourth-grade teacher in Virginia who performed a mock slave auction in her classroom April 1 ― with the white kids pretending to buy and sell the black kids ― was duly chastised by school officials for her racial insensitivity. Given that she meant to be giving a lesson on the Civil War, she should also have been scolded for pedagogical inaccuracy. Think about it. If she really wanted to hav...

The world commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophic accident in Ukraine on April 26. However, this event did not do justice to the significance and impact of this plant on the world, as I saw and felt about it in 1997. When I got the first sight of the sarcophagus of the Chernobyl nuclear power station while being driven in the Exclusion Zone toward the ...

What’s happening in Libya? When we last checked in, President Obama had said that the United States would participate in the U.N.-sponsored no-fly zone but that this was not ― repeat not ― a war to oust Moammar Gadhafi. Rather, the narrow purpose of the operation was to avert humanitarian disaster. He acknowledged that he would like to see Gadhafi go, but said that under no circumstances would gr...

From womb to tomb, corruption has become a part of everyday life. It’s so widespread that only few Indians ― rich or poor, illiterate or highly-educated ― have not experienced it first-hand. All politicians promise to stem it but when in power, they invariably end up being stained by it. An expectant mother has to grease the palm of officials in a government hospital for admission while it is ...