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Journalist

Park Sae-jin박세진

Assistant EditorForeign embassies in Seoul & Geopolitics, Diplomacy, Policy

Experienced journalist and editor at AJU PRESS specializing in multilingual news. I cover international diplomacy, geolpolitics, and policy, consistently delivering highly accurate, compelling reporting for a worldwide audience. "Reporting the facts. Shaping the narrative. Every second counts."

Latest by Park Sae-jin

MOFA sidesteps US congressional briefing demand SEOUL, August 11 (AJP) - South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not say Tuesday whether the government will hold a briefing that Republican members of the United States House Judiciary Committee have demanded by Aug. 20 on how a new law against false and manipulated information online will be enforced. Asked at a regular briefing whether the government was discussing the request internally, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) spokesperson Park Doo-soon said Seoul was fielding inquiries from the Judiciary Committee and other bodies. He did not say what it would do about this one. "We are explaining our position on the ground, and we are working actively to raise their understanding of the intent behind the law," he said. "We are continuing to communicate." He gave no indication of whether the briefing would happen, when it might be scheduled or which agency would deliver it. The deadline falls in nine days. The demand did not go to MOFA. Four Republican lawmakers led by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent the letter on Aug. 6 to Kim Jong-cheol, chairman of the Korea Media and Communications Commission, the regulator that administers the law. They asked him to arrange a briefing no later than 10 a.m. Eastern time on Aug. 20. Representatives Scott Fitzgerald, Darrell Issa and Michael Baumgartner co-signed. The letter calls the amendment a major threat to online speech and expression, and says it would let the Korea Media and Communications Commission (KMCC) punish American companies and their users for exercising rights protected by the US Constitution. The lawmakers wrote that the law does not define false information or set out how it will be enforced. That vagueness, they argued, could be used to censor politically disfavored opinions. Park rejected the discrimination charge. "The amendment contains no element that discriminates against domestic or foreign companies, and it respects freedom of expression under the Constitution," he said. The law was written to address social harms that have come with changes in the digital environment and to strengthen protection for users, he added. The ministry has worked to convey the intent and content of the bill to the United States and other stakeholders, and will keep up the communication needed as the law takes effect. The National Assembly passed the amendment on Dec. 24, 2025, by 170 votes to three, with four abstentions among the 177 members present. The main opposition People Power Party boycotted the vote after a filibuster was cut off. The law took effect on July 7. It puts definitions of false information and manipulated information into statute for the first time. Distribution is banned only where the person knew the material was false, acted to harm someone or obtain unjust gain, and infringed another party's rights or the public interest. Courts can award up to five times the damages proven, and up to 50 million won ($352,940) where damage is difficult to quantify. The Judiciary Committee objects to the reach as much as the wording. Its letter says the law covers content publishers with more than 100,000 subscribers or a monthly average of 100,000 views, and platforms averaging more than a million daily users, thresholds met by Facebook, X, Instagram and YouTube. Large platforms must set up complaint procedures, remove offending content, publish transparency reports and submit to government investigations. The KMCC can impose fines of up to 1 billion won, about $656,000. The lawmakers noted that the regulator has said it will allow no grace period for compliance. The letter places the law in a line the committee has been drawing since last year, arguing that South Korea is following the European Union in using disinformation rules to reach American speech. It quotes the ruling Democratic Party of Korea saying in September 2025 that it intended to build a Korean version of the Digital Services Act into the Network Act. The same four lawmakers produced a committee report on July 1 accusing South Korea of discriminatory treatment of American-owned businesses, Coupang among them. Ambassador to the United States Kang Kyung-wha was recalled to Seoul from July 15 to 19 on the instruction of Foreign Minister Cho Hyun for consultations on the state of the relationship. Park described that recall Tuesday as a chance for Kang to exchange views repeatedly with the foreign minister, the National Security Office and other relevant agencies. Pressed on why the letter arrived anyway, he said several pending issues underlie the friction between the two countries and that the government judged a more coordinated response necessary. "Those efforts have continued, and we are pushing them forward harder," he said. Copies of the letter went to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and to the committee's three ranking Democrats, Jamie Raskin, Jerrold Nadler and Henry C. Johnson. 2026-08-11 16:15:15
Kookmin shrinks self-driving AI to run inside cars SEOUL, August 11 (AJP) - A self-driving car has to work out where every other vehicle, pedestrian and obstacle around it sits in three-dimensional space, and it has to do so many times a second on a computer bolted inside the car rather than in a data center. A South Korean university team says it has found a way to shrink the software that does the recognizing without losing accuracy. Kookmin University said Tuesday that two master's students in its artificial intelligence and software department, working with Hyundai Motor Company, had developed a compression method called SharedKD for the three-dimensional object detection models used in autonomous driving. Cho Hyun-jun and Ahn Sang-ho carried out the work in the research group of Kim Jang-ho, and the paper was presented in July at the Design Automation Conference in Long Beach, California. The problem the method addresses is a squeeze between two demands that pull in opposite directions. Detection models grow more accurate as they grow larger, but a car cannot carry a rack of servers, and a model that takes an extra fraction of a second to produce an answer is a model that has seen a hazard too late. Anything that runs on a vehicle has to fit within a fixed budget of processing power, electricity and heat. The standard fix is a training technique called knowledge distillation. Engineers take a large, accurate model, call it the teacher, and use its outputs to train a much smaller model, the student, so the small one learns to imitate the big one's judgments rather than learning from raw data alone. The result is a model that runs on modest hardware while behaving more like its oversized parent than its size would suggest. Distillation normally requires building and training two separate models. SharedKD does away with the second one. The full network serves as the teacher, and a subnetwork carved out of that same network by pruning, which means switching off connections judged to be doing little work, serves as the student. During training, the system uses gradients, the signals that tell a neural network how much each part of it is contributing to the final answer, to decide which parts to keep. The choice is made continuously as training proceeds rather than fixed in advance. The practical difference is one of sequence. Compression is usually something done to a model after it has finished training, a trimming of a completed object. SharedKD looks for the deployable small model at the same time the large one is being trained, and the two are set up so that each improves the other's learning. Kookmin said the approach cuts both the amount of arithmetic a detection model performs and the time it takes to produce a result, and expects it to be applied in vehicle systems and in edge AI, the general term for artificial intelligence that runs on a device rather than sending data away to be processed. How much it cuts has not been made public. The university released no performance figures for SharedKD, named no baseline model or test dataset for comparison, and did not say whether the method has been run on automotive hardware or only in the laboratory. Neither Kookmin nor Hyundai has described any plan to put it in a production vehicle. Model compression is Kim's own specialty. He joined Kookmin in September 2022 from Naver Webtoon's AI Research Lab, where he worked on meta-learning, and his doctoral research dealt with the tendency of deep learning models to become unwieldy as they become more capable. Kookmin said the project reflects its KMU Vision 2035: EDGE strategy, which designates eight areas for concentration, and that the work sits where two of them meet, the AI+X track and the mobility track. The Design Automation Conference (DAC) is the main annual gathering for the design of electronic circuits and systems, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. This year's edition, the 63rd, ran from July 26 to 29 at the Long Beach Convention Center, and organizers said more than half of the program dealt with artificial intelligence. 2026-08-11 13:53:56
KAIST lines up gas atoms to pull gas mixtures apart SEOUL, August 11 (AJP) - A South Korean research team has shown that gas atoms trapped inside a porous solid can be made to line up in a regular pattern, the way atoms line up in a crystal, instead of scattering wherever they land. The finding, so far demonstrated only in computer simulations, points to a different way of designing the materials that separate one gas from another. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology said Tuesday that a team led by Kim Ji-han in its Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering had identified the effect, which the researchers call a gas lattice, and then used artificial intelligence to design new materials that produce it on demand. Porous materials have been studied for decades on one question above all, which is how much gas they can hold. The atoms and molecules that go inside were assumed to stick anywhere there was room. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) said the team found that under the right conditions the host material behaves like a mold, steering the gas into fixed positions. The materials in question are metal-organic frameworks, built by linking metal clusters with organic molecules into a rigid scaffold shot through with pores far too small to see. Chemists often describe a metal-organic framework (MOF) as a molecular sponge, because it soaks up gas the way a kitchen sponge soaks up water. Why the arrangement matters comes down to cost. Pulling one gas out of a mixture is among the most energy-hungry jobs in industry, and the team tested its idea on one of the hardest cases. Xenon, a noble gas used in medical imaging, anesthesia and satellite thrusters, makes up about 0.087 parts per million of the atmosphere, roughly one atom in every 11 million. It is recovered as a byproduct when air is chilled until it liquefies and then distilled. The same process yields krypton, about 13 times more common in air, and separating the two afterward takes a second round of distillation at cryogenic temperatures. Screening a large database of known frameworks, the researchers found one in which simulated xenon stopped behaving like a gas. Inside a cobalt-based structure called Co-CAU-36, the atoms settled into what physicists call a body-centered cubic arrangement, meaning one atom at each corner of an imaginary cube and one more at its center, repeated through the pore. The team's own comparison is a box of balls. Poured in, they land anywhere. Set down one at a time, they form a pattern. The reason is geometry. The pore walls carry a repeating series of spots where a xenon atom sits most comfortably, and once enough atoms are inside, those spots dictate the arrangement. Crystallizing a gas normally demands extreme cold or crushing pressure. Here the ordering came from the shape of the container. A stranger result came when the team put xenon and krypton in together. Instead of mixing, the two gases divided by position. Xenon formed an ordered shell against the pore walls, and krypton collected in the space at the center. That is a different mechanism from the one the field normally relies on. Conventional separation materials work by gripping one gas more tightly than the other. In the simulations, the split came from where each gas ended up rather than how firmly it stuck. The team then turned the question around. Rather than picking a material and watching what the gas inside it does, the researchers specified the arrangement they wanted and let software hunt for a structure that would deliver it. They paired machine learning with a genetic algorithm, a method that breeds and mutates candidate designs over many generations and keeps whichever ones score best. The approach produced framework designs that order xenon into the body-centered pattern and into a face-centered one, where the extra atoms sit at the center of each cube face instead of in the middle. "This study is the first case of lining gas up like a crystal inside a porous material," Kim said. "We have moved past thinking only about how much gas a material can hold, and opened the possibility of designing the arrangement itself." Several steps stand between the paper and any industrial plant. Everything reported was done on a computer. Nobody has yet loaded xenon into Co-CAU-36 in a laboratory and measured the lattice, and the frameworks the software designed have not been built. Co-CAU-36 itself is real and was first reported in 2018, but the new structures exist as designs. The team has also not tested the concept on carbon dioxide or hydrogen, the two gases with the largest commercial stakes, and both are molecules rather than single atoms, which behave differently in a tight space. "Applied to carbon dioxide and other molecules, this could be used to design separation and storage materials suited to a specific purpose," Kim said. Kim Young-hun and Kim Do-hoon, both doctoral candidates at KAIST, were joint first authors, and Kim Seung-woo, a master's student, and Lim Yun-sung, who holds a doctorate, were second authors. The paper, "Framework-templated gas lattices in metal-organic frameworks," was published online in Nature Communications on June 23. 2026-08-11 10:32:30
Webtoon Entertainment takes majority stake in RI Games SEOUL, August 11 (AJP) - Webtoon Entertainment is buying its way into the business of turning its own comics into games and films, ending years in which the company handed its biggest hits to outside studios and collected a fee while somebody else kept the franchise. The Nasdaq-listed operator of Naver Webtoon disclosed two deals on Monday alongside second quarter results. It agreed to buy a 60 percent stake in RI Games Holdings for about $100 million in cash, paid across two closings, and signed a limited partnership agreement with Naver Corporation in July to establish a $100 million fund that will invest in adaptations of its titles. The company has not said how much of the fund it is putting up itself. Both moves target the same weakness. Webtoon publishes the comics that have fed South Korea's streaming boom, including Sweet Home, All of Us Are Dead, Hellbound and Bloodhounds, and it has almost always sold the screen rights rather than produced the adaptation itself. That distinction decides who gets rich. Under a licensing deal, a streamer pays an agreed amount for the right to make the series, and the payment is set before anyone knows whether it will work. If the show becomes a global hit and runs three seasons, the fee does not grow. Company president Kim Yong-soo said the pattern is now a problem the company intends to fix. "Historically, our adaptation business has been based on a licensing model, which means that the success of those adaptations has not always translated directly into meaningful economics for ," he said on the earnings call. RI Games Holdings was founded by Kevin Han, who built Redice Studio, the production house behind the Solo Leveling comic, serialized in South Korea on the rival KakaoPage platform. It operates two game studios, GrayGames and Offbeat, and the companies plan to release multiple games over the next four years drawn from webcomic titles including Doom Breaker and Omniscient Reader, both of which run on Naver Webtoon, and Overgeared, another KakaoPage title. Webtoon intends to time game launches to coincide with animated versions of the same stories. Chief financial officer David Lee said the arrangement lets Webtoon skip the part most publishers get wrong. "We are not seeking to build ground-up capability in gaming," he said. "We have 120,000 stories arriving every day from 27 million creators, and we know from data what can be a hit, not just on our platform, but off it." Lee said certain terms of the agreement were redacted in the company's filing, and that the structure includes put options on both sides, obliging each party to buy the other out under conditions Webtoon has not disclosed. The strategy shift landed on a quarter that looked worse in dollars than it was in practice. Revenue came in at $338.5 million, about 508 billion won at the quarter's average rate of 1,500.7 won to the dollar, down 2.8 percent from a year earlier. Almost all of that decline is a currency effect. Webtoon earns most of its money in won and yen but reports in dollars, and both weakened over the quarter, so identical sales in Seoul and Tokyo converted into fewer dollars. Strip the exchange rate out and revenue grew 5.2 percent. The net loss widened to $14.6 million from $3.9 million a year earlier, which the company attributed to a tax bill and to advertising spending. Measured before those items, the quarter beat expectations, with adjusted earnings of four cents a share and gross margin up almost a full percentage point to 26 percent. The two core markets moved in opposite directions. South Korean revenue grew 20 percent in constant currency, with paying readers up 10.4 percent to 3.8 million. Japan fell 6.7 percent, with paying readers down 9.5 percent to 2.1 million. Guidance for the current quarter implies constant currency growth of 0.7 to 3.3 percent, well below the pace just reported. Management maintained a commitment to double-digit growth by the end of the year, then clarified under questioning that the figure refers to the rate the company expects to be running at as the fourth quarter closes, not to the quarter as a whole. Shares closed the regular session at $9.45 before the results, then fell 6.2 percent in after-hours trading to $8.86, against a 52-week range that runs from $8.30 to $22.47. The RI Games purchase alone accounts for about a sixth of the $583 million in cash Webtoon Entertainment held at the end of the quarter. 2026-08-11 09:41:44
Mecca defense pact buries American security guarantee Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed a treaty last week promising to defend each other if any one of them is attacked. That is the promise the United States has been making to these countries for decades. The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement was signed on Aug. 7 at Al-Safa Palace in Mecca by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. The joint statement says an attack on one "shall be regarded as an attack against them all." That one sentence is nearly all we know. The three governments have not published the treaty text. There is no joint command, no rule for how new members join, no agreement on stationing troops in each other's countries. To see why these three signed, start with what happened in Doha last year. Israeli aircraft bombed a Hamas delegation in the Qatari capital on Sept. 9, 2025, killing five Hamas members and a Qatari security officer. The group was reading an American ceasefire proposal at the time. It was the first time Israel had struck Qatar. Qatar hosts Al Udeid, the biggest US military base in the region. The White House said the bombing "does not advance Israel or America's goals," and said the US military had told President Donald Trump it was coming. Washington knew, and did nothing. Eight days later, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed their own mutual defense agreement in Riyadh. Eleven months after that, Türkiye joined them in Mecca. One sentence and three signatures do not sound like much. But that is about all NATO was in April 1949. The joint commands and permanent headquarters took another ten years to build. The question everyone is asking is who this pact is meant to stop. None of the three will say. Erdoğan wrote on X that the deal rests on "collective deterrence" and that Türkiye still wants to solve problems through talks. Sharif called it a "historic endeavour" for the region's security. The other two went further. Saudi deputy minister for public diplomacy Rayed Krimly wrote that the agreement is not meant to build a military bloc or a religious one, and has nothing to do with nuclear weapons or an arms race. Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar wrote that the pact is purely defensive and "not targeted against any country." Nobody denies things that nobody has accused them of. The reason the three governments will not name an enemy is simpler than diplomacy. Each of them is worried about a different country. For Türkiye, that country is Israel, and this is not guesswork. At a cabinet meeting on Feb. 22, Netanyahu described a "hexagon" of alliances Israel would build against what he called a radical Shia axis and an emerging radical Sunni axis. He named India, Greece, Cyprus, and unnamed Arab, African and Asian states. Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett had already told a conference that "a new Turkish threat is emerging," and that Israel needs to act against Türkiye at the same time as Iran. In July, Netanyahu lobbied in Washington against selling F-35 fighter jets to Türkiye, telling reporters the country "is governed by a man who calls openly for the annihilation of Israel." Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said Israel is deliberately turning Türkiye into its next enemy. Whatever else is true, Ankara did not start this fight and did not start it this year. Saudi Arabia is worried about something else. Since the Iran war began with American and Israeli strikes on Feb. 28, Iranian missiles and drones have hit targets across the kingdom, including oil refineries, killing two civilians and wounding 12. A Houthi strike set the Jizan refinery on fire on July 25. Riyadh has also never recognized Israel, and it was negotiating over doing so before the Gaza war. Yoel Guzansky, who runs Gulf research at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies, has said the new pact does not completely close that door. Pakistan has said both things, through the same man. In a television interview in September 2025, Defense Minister Khawaja Asif was asked whether the deterrence Pakistan gets from nuclear weapons would be extended to Saudi Arabia. What Pakistan has, he answered, would be made available under the agreement. He took it back within days, saying nuclear weapons were not on the radar. Asked about it at a weekly press briefing, Foreign Office spokesman Shafqat Ali Khan would say only that Pakistan's nuclear doctrine has evolved and continues to do so. Then, one day after the Mecca treaty, Asif called for a united military front against Israel, which he called a threat to the whole Muslim world. His own foreign minister had just said the pact targets nobody. So this is not three countries building an anti-Israel bloc. It is three countries facing three different threats who reached the same conclusion about the same protector. Israel's actions are what pushed that conclusion into the open. Doha is where it became impossible to ignore. If an American ally country hosting roughly 10,000 American troops can be bombed by another American ally, with Washington told in advance and doing nothing, then the American guarantee is a favor rather than a commitment. Riyadh worked that out in eight days. Ankara worked it out over a year of Israeli politicians calling it the next target. Pakistan has been hedging for decades. Whether this treaty turns into a real alliance is something we can check. Watch for the Turkish parliament ratifying it, for the text being published, for rules on new members, for a joint planning staff, for combined air and missile defense drills. The practical obstacles are large. Saudi Arabia flies American equipment, Pakistan flies Chinese and domestic equipment, Türkiye flies NATO and Turkish equipment. Their systems cannot talk to each other, and none of the three keeps supplies stored in the others' countries. There is also a precedent for this kind of promise not being kept. In April 2015, when Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were as close as they have ever been, Pakistan's parliament voted unanimously to stay out of the Yemen war instead of sending the combat troops Riyadh asked for. 2026-08-10 14:40:38
KAIST president unveils AI native campus vision SEOUL, August 10 (AJP) - Artificial intelligence will run through teaching, research, administration and campus energy systems at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology under a plan its new president set out Monday, one that treats AI as a shared tool for every field of study rather than the property of specialists. Bae Choong-sik presented the plan at his inauguration as the 18th president of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), held at the university's main auditorium. He took office on July 1 and used the ceremony to declare a new institutional vision, "Fundamentals First, Innovation Forward," ahead of the university's 60th anniversary in 2031. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT Bae Kyung-hoon attended, along with former president Lee Kwang-hyung and ambassadors posted to Seoul. The changes fall under five strategies KAIST calls the Beyond Series: Beyond AI, Beyond Laboratory, Beyond Barriers, Beyond Carbon and Beyond KAIST. The first commits the university to a curriculum rebuilt around AI use. Every course will carry an AI use grade, sorted into three levels that run from foundational teaching conducted without AI at all to courses in which students design AI systems. Undergraduate humanities and social science teaching will expand, as will laboratory practice. "Designing learning around AI, not simply transmitting knowledge, is the beginning of AX educational innovation," Bae said, using an abbreviation for AI transformation. Research will move toward physical AI, meaning systems that act in the world through robots, self-driving vehicles and advanced manufacturing, alongside quantum technology and climate and energy research. KAIST plans to bring more corporate satellite laboratories onto campus, following its recent cooperation with Nvidia, and to build an AI Autonomous Lab that folds AI into joint research with companies. Startup education will reach first-year students for the first time, taught with founders drawn from the alumni network. Bae said technology companies started by KAIST graduates now hold combined assets of more than 100 trillion won. Administration will be rebuilt on AI tools, with internal regulations cut and incentives offered to staff who lead the change. The campus itself becomes a living lab for climate and energy technology, with building energy systems linked through an AI model developed with the university's climate and energy research institute. International work expands through dual degree programs, overseas scholars on dissertation committees and a global advisory group, under a program KAIST calls Global Connect. The ceremony departed from the usual form. Rather than deliver a conventional address, Bae explained the strategies himself in a staged presentation directed by Kang Yi-yeon, a professor in KAIST's Department of Industrial Design. Three speakers followed with working examples, covering digital twins in shipbuilding, AI in chip production and physical AI in cars and robots. Bae is a specialist in clean energy and carbon-neutral power engineering. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in aerospace engineering at Seoul National University and a doctorate in mechanical engineering at Imperial College London in 1994. He joined KAIST in 1998 and later headed the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and served as dean of the College of Engineering. He chairs the sustainable combustion technology collaboration program at the International Energy Agency and was the first South Korean named a fellow of SAE International in the powertrain field. "I will develop KAIST into a university that creates new standards beyond innovation, and into a national innovation platform leading the future of South Korean science and technology," he said. 2026-08-10 13:40:18
Kakao settles wage dispute after first strike SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - A wage agreement that took 18 rounds of bargaining and the first strike in the company's history was ratified this week, closing a roughly three-month standoff at Kakao over how the South Korean technology company pays for performance. The deal applies a 6.3 percent increase measured against the funding base for total annual salary, excluding money set aside for stage-up raises tied to moves into higher job grades and roles. Employees also receive a special bonus of 3 million won, about $2,110. "Voting by members on the tentative agreement has been completed," the Kakao branch of the Korean Chemical, Textile and Food Workers' Union said Friday. Both sides had agreed since early this year that pay would rise. What they could not agree on was the formula underneath it. The union sought a 6.9 percent raise and a defined standard for performance pay set at 13 to 14 percent of operating profit, worth about 10 million won a person, or roughly $7,030. Kakao countered with 6.8 percent and performance pay funded at 10 percent of operating profit, on the condition that restricted stock units already promised to employees be counted inside that pool. Restricted stock units are company shares granted to staff that convert into ownership only after a set holding period. Talks went nowhere. The Gyeonggi Regional Labor Relations Commission suspended mediation on May 27, a ruling that handed the union the legal right to take industrial action and turned a bargaining impasse into a labor dispute. Members walked out for four hours on June 10, the first strike since Kakao was founded. The pressure continued through the summer. On June 29 employees took annual leave and logged out of internal work systems in a protest the union called a logout day. Picket demonstrations followed inside company offices on July 21. The two sides reached a tentative settlement on July 29. "We plan to faithfully implement the agreement reached in these negotiations and to work together on sustainable growth and a working environment where members can focus more on their work," a Kakao official said. The agreement closes once the two sides complete the remaining steps, including a signing ceremony. 2026-08-07 17:24:31
Homeplus reopens 67 stores after 25-day shutdown SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - Shelves stood about 30 percent stocked, by the company's own count, when 67 Homeplus stores reopened across South Korea on Friday, 25 days after the country's second-largest hypermarket chain ran out of cash to keep them running. A court in Seoul will decide within four weeks whether the company survives. Homeplus called Friday's reopening a soft opening rather than a return to normal trading at the 67 big-box stores, which combine a full supermarket with floors of clothing and household goods. Checkout systems, deliveries and stock control are being tested in live conditions through Aug. 12, and the stores are scheduled to open fully on Aug. 13. The company said the rest of its goods would arrive before then. The Seoul Bankruptcy Court has set Sept. 4 as the deadline for creditors to approve a rehabilitation plan under South Korea's court-supervised restructuring process, and the law permits no further extension. A meeting of creditors to vote on the plan is expected between late this month and early September. The stores reopened on borrowed money. Meritz Financial Group, the company's largest creditor, transferred a 200 billion won loan, about $141 million at Friday's exchange rate, this week. The court had terminated the rehabilitation on July 3 after Homeplus failed to raise that amount on its own, and every store shut on July 13. The company appealed on July 20, the final day available, after its owner MBK Partners and the firm's chairman, Kim Byung-ju, guaranteed the Meritz loan in full. The court reversed itself the next day. Members of the Korean Mart Labor Union's Homeplus branch appeared at the National Assembly press briefing room on Friday alongside lawmakers from the Democratic Party of Korea, the Rebuilding Korea Party, the Progressive Party and the Social Democratic Party, and asked the public to shop at the reopened stores. "Homeplus, which was on the verge of liquidation because of the irresponsible greed of speculative capital, reopened its doors today," they said. The phrase pointed at MBK Partners, the private equity firm that has owned Homeplus since 2015. The company, now fighting for its survival, spent most of its 28 years as a fixture of South Korean life. Samsung C&T opened the first Homeplus in Daegu on Sept. 4, 1997, months before the Asian financial crisis forced Samsung to hand control to Britain's Tesco. The chain grew into one half of a duopoly with Emart, absorbing the former Carrefour stores in 2008 after both Carrefour and Walmart gave up on the market, until Tesco's accounting scandal pushed it to sell Homeplus to MBK for 7.2 trillion won, about $6.4 billion at the time and the largest buyout in South Korean history. Homeplus has said 2.7 trillion won of that price was borrowed against its own shares. The debt came due just as Coupang's overnight grocery delivery, launched nationwide in 2019 and supercharged by the pandemic, redrew how South Koreans shop. Hypermarkets' share of retail sales fell from 15.1 percent in 2021 to 9.8 percent last year, while online purchases accounted for more than 60 percent of total retail sales by March this year. Homeplus filed for rehabilitation in March last year, suspended 37 of its 104 hypermarkets in May, and sold its convenience-supermarket chain in June. The plan before creditors is to rebuild the company as a smaller entity. Homeplus intends to cut multi-story stores down to single floors of about 3,300 square meters and stock them with food, household essentials and its own private-label goods, a format the company has compared to the American chain Trader Joe's. Homeplus said traffic to its membership app reached 100,000 visitors after it announced the reopening date, above the level of a year earlier. Should creditors reject the plan, or fail to vote by Sept. 4, Homeplus enters bankruptcy proceedings regardless of how much money sits in its accounts. 2026-08-07 16:44:06
Uzbek President Mirziyoyev holds open business dialogue in August SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - Uzbekistan will hold its annual open dialogue between President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and entrepreneurs in late August, the Uzbek Embassy in Seoul said on Friday, with no date yet fixed three weeks out. Nearly 6,000 inquiries have reached the organizing commission's call centers and official bots since intake opened, according to material the embassy distributed. More than 4,200 were resolved, and roughly 1,800 remain under review. Expert groups are working through 300 problems classified as systemic. Business ombudsman Abdumannop Buriev, appointed in December and facing his first dialogue in the post, said the office is trying to catch problems earlier. "We focus primary attention on building a preventive system that averts issues before they arise and protects entrepreneurs' rights early on," Buriev said in the embassy statement. The largest clusters of inquiries concern legal protection for entrepreneurs, with more than 940, and banking, with more than 910. Allocation of production space drew more than 750, and simplification of business regulation nearly 680. Kashkadarya region, Tashkent city, Samarkand region and Fergana region generated the highest volumes. Away from the call center, government bodies have held more than 750 meetings with over 8,800 entrepreneurs, producing more than 3,500 proposals and complaints. The business ombudsman's office and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry ran a further 130 meetings drawing more than 5,700 entrepreneurs, who raised close to 1,500 issues. Mirziyoyev held the first of these dialogues on August 20, 2021. Four have followed, all in August, the most recent last year in New Tashkent and the one before that in Nukus. Measures announced at the meetings have reached the statute book. The 2022 dialogue removed the Chamber of Commerce and Industry from government subordination and abolished criminal liability for violating trade rules. At the 2024 meeting in Nukus, the ceiling on microloans was tripled to 300 million soum, about $25,000, and all banks and microfinance organizations were cleared to lend to small and medium businesses. The president's office says close to a thousand proposals raised at the meetings have been written into legislation. The machinery around them was formalized by a presidential resolution in May 2024, which created a republican commission to organize the dialogue and regional working groups to handle problems locally. Under that resolution, appeals are taken around the clock from June 15 each year, sorted daily to expert groups and regional teams, and systemic problems are reviewed weekly. Ahead of last year's dialogue, the call center took more than 13,000 appeals and proposals, the president's office said at the time. That was a final count. Under the 2024 resolution, intake runs until the dialogue itself, and this year's stands at roughly 6,000. 2026-08-07 15:41:24
South Korea shares AI forensic know-hows with Tajikistan SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - South Korean police and forensic specialists trained about 30 Tajik law enforcement officials in Dushanbe this week in methods for investigating phone scams, deepfake fraud and crimes committed through cryptocurrency. The program targeted a category of crime that has grown alongside Tajikistan's reliance on money sent home by migrant workers. The World Bank put remittance inflows at about 49 percent of gross domestic product in 2024, up from 39 percent the previous year and the highest share of any economy in the world. Fraud built around fake overseas job placements and visa processing has spread with that dependence. "This seminar can contribute not only to the response to sharply increasing cybercrime in Tajikistan, but also to the protection of our residents and nationals there," said Jeon Sung-sik, South Korea's ambassador to Tajikistan. He described the program as the first policing cooperation between the two countries and said he expected it to solidify their public safety and law enforcement networks. The Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) organized the seminar through its Dushanbe office. Its delegation drew experts from the Korean National Police Agency, the National Forensic Service and the consulting firm KOFO. Tajik participants came from the interior ministry, the police and the border guard service. Before the sessions opened, the visiting experts spent Monday at the Tajik interior ministry's digital forensics center and at border management facilities, examining the conditions local investigators work in. Lectures ran Tuesday through Thursday. Specialists from the Korean National Police Agency, the Korean National Police University and the National Forensic Service presented South Korean research on using artificial intelligence to detect voice phishing calls and deepfakes, which are video or audio recordings altered to impersonate a real person. Further sessions covered tracing crimes carried out with cryptocurrency, analyzing digital evidence drawn from Telegram and large language models, authenticating collected evidence, and pulling data from mobile phones and internet-connected devices. KOICA also held a joint workshop on Tuesday with the International Organization for Migration, where officials from both countries reviewed recent patterns in online fraud aimed at migrants and people seeking work abroad. The program closed Friday with a discussion of international coordination, joined by the British and United States embassies in Dushanbe, the European Union, the International Organization for Migration, the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Electronic evidence in online fraud, digital sex crimes and virtual asset cases frequently sits on servers outside the country where the crime was reported, which makes such cases difficult to prosecute without agreements between governments. Ismonalizoda Mavluda, a senior professor in information security and digital technology at a Tajik police training institute, attended the sessions. "KOICA and the experts from these institutions shared Korea's advanced technology and capability in digital crime, a field where response has been difficult until now," she said. "I hope the cooperation continues." 2026-08-07 15:02:02