In "short-form" Korean economy, media empire is latest casualty SEOUL, June 17 (AJP) - South Korea is becoming a "short-form" society, where consumers increasingly favor quick commerce, short visits and low-friction experiences. As those habits harden, a growing list of institutions once considered too big to fail is discovering that their traditional business models no longer justify a physical trip. The latest casualty is JoongAng Group, one of South Korea's largest media empires, whose holdings include the 61-year-old JoongAng Ilbo newspap June 17, 2026

K-pop sells out the world. Seoul can't always host the show SEOUL, June 16 (AJP) - BTS returned to Busan on June 12 for the homecoming stretch of its "Arirang" tour, but the concert began about 75 minutes later than scheduled. HYBE later apologized, citing confusion in on-site guidance, bottlenecks in fan gift distribution lines and delays in merchandise pickup. Two months earlier, the same tour had opened on April 9 at Goyang Stadium, an open-air athletic stadium in Goyang, north of Seoul, where fans watched the show in the rain. Neither case June 16, 2026

After Hormuz relief, KOSPI's next target is developed-market status SEOUL, June 15 (AJP)-With the Gulf crisis moving toward resolution, South Korea's stock market faces next test: whether a chip-led rally can carry the KOSPI from one of the world's best-performing markets to a developed-market benchmark. Semiconductors can lift the index. They cannot, by themselves, make Korea a developed market. The KOSPI has surged 92.8 percent since end-2025, far outpacing Taiwan's 52.5 percent gain, Japan's 31.1 percent rise and the Dow's 6.5 percen June 15, 2026

SpaceX IPO fever meets Starlink's reality check in Asia SEOUL, June 12 (AJP) - SpaceX's record-shattering market debut is drawing fresh attention to Starlink, its satellite internet business, as investors look beyond rockets and Mars ambitions to identify the company's most important source of revenue. While SpaceX is best known for reusable rockets and the Starship program, analysts increasingly view Starlink as the company's financial engine. The low-Earth orbit satellite internet network has become SpaceX's largest business segmen June 12, 2026

Korea's defense of won tested by SpaceX frenzy and foreign exodus SEOUL, June 11 (AJP) - South Korean authorities battling to defend the won near global financial crisis-era levels appeared to move to contain a retail rush into the blockbuster SpaceX listing on Friday, as surging demand for U.S. assets threatens to add pressure on the currency alongside a record foreign capital exodus. The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) on Thursday summoned auditors from 12 major brokerages and urged them to strengthen internal controls over overseas investment brokerage June 11, 2026

Korea's job decline exposes weakness beneath chip boom SEOUL, June 11 (AJP) - South Korea’s employment rate fell by the steepest pace in five years as weakness in manufacturing and youth hiring exposed the limited spillover from a recovery increasingly driven by memory chip exports. According to data released Thursday by Ministry of Data and Statistics, the employment rate for people aged 15 and older fell 0.5 percentage point to 63.3 percent, marking the sharpest decline since February 2021. The number of employed people aged 15 and older w June 11, 2026

Korea's defense of won falls short against foreign capital exodus SEOUL, June 10 (AJP) - South Korean authorities this year have been employing every tool in the playbook to bolster the Korean won, dangerously flirting around post-2008 crisis levels — from a $65 billion FX swap arrangement with the National Pension Service and suspected smoothing operations to a rare joint probe into foreign exchange activities at major banks. But so far, all have proved of little avail. Each measure has offered short-term relief, only to wear off with every bout of KOS June 10, 2026

Huang finds the whole AI cake in Korea, every layer of it SEOUL, June 09 (AJP) - Artificial intelligence is a five-layer cake, Nvidia preaches, and its chairman Jensen Huang appears to have found the full cake in South Korea. In Nvidia's telling, AI is a composite stack: energy at the bottom, then chips, then the infrastructure that houses and serves them, then the models, and finally the applications where economic value is harvested. Every application, Huang argues, draws demand all the way down to the power plant, and supremacy in the AI era h June 9, 2026

South Korea sees record drug tests as narcotics use rises among young people SEOUL, June 5 (AJP) - The number of drug tests is rising as synthetic drugs spread among teenagers and cases of fatal mixed-drug use increase. According to a report released by the National Forensic Service (NFS) earlier this week, the number of drug tests conducted reached 140,775 last year, the highest on record. Drug-related busts and the amount of narcotics seized have both risen steadily year after year. The Korea Customs Service (KCS) seized 769 kilograms of drugs in 704 cases in 2023, 7 June 5, 2026

Nvidia CEO's Seoul trip signals shift from chip buyer to physical-AI partner SEOUL, June 5 (AJP) - When Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang stepped off his plane at Gimpo International Airport on Friday and made an esports cafe his first stop, the image was familiar: the chip merchant returning to the gaming culture that built him. The substance of this visit, however, points somewhere far off. This trip is less about who buys Nvidia's graphics cards than about who can help the company teach machines to act in the physical world. South Korea, a manufacturing power with ch June 5, 2026