Journalist
Candice Kim, Lim Jaeho
candicekim1121@ajupress.com, ajupresswogh@ajupress.com
-
Seongsu – how pop-up fever turned shop space into show space Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in AJP’s Seongsu series, which examines how Seoul’s former factory district transformed into a global hub for pop-ups, brand experiences and new forms of urban consumption. SEOUL, February 12 (AJP) - In Seongsu, a former industrial district in eastern Seoul, retail space is no longer leased mainly to sell goods. It is rented — by the day or the week — to buy attention. Over the past decade, short-term pop-up leases have replaced the two-year commercial contracts that still define most of the city’s retail landscape. In prime pockets such as Yeonmujang-gil, a large venue of about 900 square meters (around 270 pyeong) can now cost between 100 million and 200 million won ($75,000–$150,000) for a single week, according to 2024 market data from local brokerages and industry reports. If booked continuously, that translates into a monthly equivalent of 400 million to 800 million won ($300,000–$600,000). By contrast, the effective monthly rent (E.NOC) for traditional retail and office space in Seongsu stood at about 290,000 won per pyeong in 2023, according to the 2024 Seongsu Office Market Report by commercial real estate data firm Alsquare. The widening gap illustrates what analysts describe as a “decoupling” of asset value from retail fundamentals. A parallel market has emerged, where short-term “event leases” are priced not by expected shop sales, but by brand demand, seasonality and promotional timing. A Market That Runs on Weeks, Not Years This structure remains unusual in Korea, where stability has long been the defining feature of commercial leasing. “Contracts like those in Seongsu are very rare,” said Lee, a building owner who manages several properties in the capital. “Most places in Seoul are leased on a minimum two-year basis. Seongsu operates on completely different rules.” Those rules are shaped by flexibility — and by scarcity. “Most pop-ups here run on very short terms, from a single day to a few weeks,” said Kang, a Seongsu-based broker. “Everything is negotiable. But if you want to open for just one or two days, it’s extremely expensive. Daily rates often start from around 10 million won and rise quickly depending on demand.” For landlords, the appeal is clear. Short-term leases allow them to capture peak-season premiums that long-term tenants cannot match. For brands, the costs are justified as marketing investments rather than rent. A Global Outlier By international standards, Seongsu’s pricing has reached striking levels. In Tokyo’s Shibuya district, pop-up spaces typically start at around 920,000 yen ($5,700) per week for smaller venues. In New York’s Soho, prime Broadway retail rents average about $726 per square foot annually, translating to roughly $135,000 per week for a comparable 900-square-meter space. At its peak, Seongsu now rivals both. In many cases, transactions bypass conventional real estate brokers. Large venues operate as registered event spaces, signing short-term venue-hire agreements directly with brands, blurring the boundary between retail, exhibition and entertainment. For marketers, the rationale is straightforward. “Pop-ups are not about making money from sales,” said Lee Seung-hwan, head of FIG, a creative agency. “They are about branding. Once you add production, design and staffing, budgets can easily reach hundreds of millions of won.” The Economics of “Digital Bricks” Beyond weekly venue fees, interior construction alone often reaches about 1 billion won ($750,000) for high-end pop-ups — all written off over just two or three weeks of operation. Unlike conventional stores, where fit-out costs are depreciated over years, Seongsu pop-ups treat the entire investment as a one-off marketing expense. According to digital marketing firm Inquivix, the primary performance indicator is the “Offline-to-Online (O2O) Loop,” tracked through spikes in Naver searches, social media mentions and map “saves,” rather than in-store revenue. The physical space functions as a content studio — a place to generate what marketers call “digital bricks,” visual assets that build a brand’s online presence long after the pop-up closes. High Rewards, High Risk For smaller brands, however, the boom resembles a high-stakes gamble. “A lot of founders dream of opening a pop-up in Seongsu at least once,” said Yoon, a clothing brand owner in her 30s. “It’s a powerful way to introduce your brand. But everyone knows how expensive it is. Only companies with strong backing can really afford it now.” Rising costs have gradually narrowed participation to large domestic labels, global luxury brands and well-funded startups. According to the 2025 Pop-up Trend Report by Sweet Spot, the number of pop-up stores in its network jumped 109 percent in 2025 to 3,077, with Seongsu accounting for about 35 percent. What began as a fashion and beauty marketing tool has expanded into technology and finance. Data and crypto-related firms such as Palantir and Upbit have used Seongsu pop-ups to turn abstract services into physical experiences. Foreign Foot Traffic Fuels the Premium Foreign visitors have helped sustain the surge. Data from the Seongdong District Tourism Survey show that Seongsu’s foreign visitor count rose from about 60,000 in 2018 to roughly 3 million in 2024. Spending by foreign tourists in the district reached 74.8 billion won ($56 million) in 2024, up 1.8 times from a year earlier. “Even when daily rent runs into the millions of won, it can still make sense,” the broker said. “Foreign customers lift overall sales.” The leasing boom has fed directly into asset prices. Land values in Seongsu rose from about 40 million won per pyeong in 2018 to around 140 million won in 2023, according to Alsquare — more than a threefold increase. Analysts describe the result as a new phase of gentrification, in which long-term neighborhood businesses are pushed out by short-term marketing installations. For visitors, the spectacle often conceals the economics. “I just enjoy going to Seongsu to see what’s new,” said Lee Min-joo, a Seoul resident in her 30s. “I didn’t realize how much money goes into these places. But the interiors, scents and atmosphere stay in your memory. I almost map which brand was where.” That reaction captures Seongsu’s transformation. The district is no longer priced like a retail neighborhood. It is priced like media time — sold in short slots, bid up by competition, and justified by reach rather than receipts. 2026-02-12 16:26:34 -
LocknLock highlights new products, meets partners at Ambiente 2026 SEOUL, February 12 (AJP) - South Korean household goods maker LocknLock said on Wednesday it has completed its participation in Ambiente 2026, the world’s largest consumer goods trade fair, held in Frankfurt from Feb. 6 to 10, where it showcased new and flagship products to global buyers. The company said the event, which drew brands and buyers from 176 countries, served as a platform to present its portfolio across food storage containers, beverageware, cookware and child-friendly product lines. LocknLock added that its booth was designed to allow visitors to navigate each product category and that it hosted partner invitation programs and on-site events to engage buyers and visitors. At the exhibition, LocknLock introduced a range of products planned for 2026, including items from Daekket, a premium cookware brand it launched earlier. The company said Daekket focuses on products that link cooking and plating and has received positive market feedback since its debut. In the food storage segment, LocknLock showcased its Fresh Maestro Vacuum Container, which uses a three-stage vacuum sealing system, while in beverageware it presented the Metro Café Ceramic Tumbler, featuring an interior ceramic coating designed to preserve beverage taste. The company said the tumbler drew strong interest from visitors. LocknLock also displayed products already popular in the Korean market, including the Suit stainless frying pan and the Schoolfit Switch Color stainless steel bottle, which changes color depending on temperature. The company said it held meetings with around 40 partners during the exhibition to discuss operational plans for new products and global sales strategies for 2026, and also met potential new buyers to explore opportunities in new markets. LocknLock exports to about 120 countries through eight overseas subsidiaries, including in Vietnam, the United States and Germany, and has expanded its business beyond food storage containers into beverageware and small appliances, it said. “During the exhibition, we discussed operational plans for new products and global sales strategies for 2026 with key partners, and confirmed the potential to expand into new markets through meetings with new buyers,” said a LocknLock representative. 2026-02-12 15:32:51 -
Korea's Gentle Monster marks 15 years, grows into global eyewear brand SEOUL, February 10 (AJP) - South Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster marked its 15th anniversary this month, underscoring its rise from a local label into a global fashion name as Korean brands gain traction overseas. The company currently operates 84 stores worldwide, including in New York, London, Paris and Milan, and has staged 33 collaborations with fashion houses and artists ranging from Fendi and Moncler to Maison Margiela and Tilda Swinton, according to the company. Gentle Monster, run by IICOMBINED, said overseas units now account for about 40 percent of its sales, highlighting growing demand for Korean-designed eyewear beyond its home market. Founded in 2011, the brand helped reshape Korea’s eyewear market by positioning glasses as a fashion item rather than a purely functional product, and has since expanded into major retail hubs across Asia, North America and Europe. “Over the past 15 years, we have grown into a global brand by focusing on product quality and a distinctive brand identity,” said a Gentle Monster spokesperson. “We will continue to expand into new areas beyond fashion through innovative design and differentiated customer experiences.” 2026-02-10 17:22:00 -
The next big chip from Korea – flash successor to HBM: KAIST expert SEOUL, February 10 (AJP) - High-bandwidth memory (HBM) has powered the current AI boom, but soaring costs and capacity limits are shifting attention to what comes next. The next big chip to come from Korea's memory powerhouse will be flash-based successor designed for the inference-heavy phase of AI, according to a chip expert. “Now is the time to move beyond HBM. The era of high-bandwidth flash is coming — and it will unfold within the next decade,” Kim Jung-ho, a professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), said Tuesday during a livestreamed session hosted by the KAIST Tera Lab, which he leads. Kim’s forecast reflects a growing industry concern that memory — not compute — is becoming the primary bottleneck in scaling next-generation AI systems. As large language models expand and inference workloads multiply, the challenge is no longer just faster processors, but how much data can be stored close enough to feed them efficiently. At the center of the problem is the explosive growth of so-called key-value (KV) caches — temporary memory that stores intermediate data during AI inference in transformer-based models. These caches expand rapidly with longer context windows, pushing HBM to its practical limits in both capacity and cost. HBM functions as ultra-fast “working memory” placed next to GPUs, but its capacity growth has lagged behind model demands. According to publicly available specifications from Nvidia, the H100 accelerator carries 80 gigabytes of HBM, while the H200 offers 141 gigabytes. Industry tracker TrendForce estimates the upcoming Blackwell-based B200 will reach roughly 192 gigabytes, with the next-generation Rubin platform expected to approach 288 gigabytes. Even those increases fall short. A single modern AI model — once intermediate data is included — can already consume hundreds of gigabytes of memory. Running a 70-billion-parameter model such as Llama-3 in FP16, for example, requires about 140 gigabytes just for model weights. When long-context inference is added, memory demand quickly exceeds what a single GPU can supply, limiting batch size and the number of users that can be served concurrently. The strain is more acute in transformer architectures, where KV caches scale linearly with context length. For a 70-billion-parameter model, KV cache requirements are estimated at roughly 45 to 64 gigabytes for a 128,000-token context window. At the million-token scale, that figure swells to roughly 327 to 512 gigabytes — two to three times larger than the model weights themselves. For 400-billion-parameter-class models, supporting million-token contexts would push memory needs into the terabyte range, far beyond today’s HBM-only configurations. “This is why performance is no longer determined by compute alone,” Kim said. “Once decoding begins, throughput becomes memory-bound. Capacity matters as much as bandwidth.” To bridge that gap, Kim argues that the industry will need high-bandwidth flash (HBF) — a stacked, NAND-based memory technology designed to offer far larger capacity than HBM while delivering much higher bandwidth than conventional storage. Rather than replacing HBM, HBF would serve as a complementary tier within a hierarchical memory system. Kim likens the relationship to a workspace: HBM is “the bookshelf next to your desk,” optimized for speed but limited in size, while HBF functions as “the library,” holding bulky data such as KV caches and long-context inputs that can be streamed back to the GPU when needed. The push toward longer context windows is already visible across the AI industry. Google’s Gemini 1.5 supports up to one to two million tokens, Anthropic’s Claude models target 200,000 to one million tokens, and Meta has signaled even longer contexts for future Llama models. Combined with retrieval-augmented generation and agent-based AI that accumulates session history, such workloads dramatically expand memory footprints. From a performance standpoint, HBM3e delivers roughly 1.2 terabytes per second of bandwidth per stack with latencies measured in tens of nanoseconds — but at a steep cost per gigabyte. Enterprise-grade solid-state drives, by contrast, offer only 10 to 30 gigabytes per second and latencies in the tens of microseconds, albeit at much lower cost. HBF aims to occupy the middle ground, targeting hundreds of gigabytes per second with microsecond-level latency, making it suitable for tiered AI memory architectures. Industry engineers increasingly expect future AI servers to adopt such layered designs, combining HBM, conventional DRAM and flash-based memory pools through high-speed interconnects such as CXL. In that setup, Kim said, HBM would remain dominant for latency-critical tasks, while HBF would emerge as the backbone for long-context and large-scale inference. “The question is no longer whether we need more memory,” Kim said. “It’s how we restructure the memory system itself. In the AI era, memory is becoming the real factory floor.” For memory makers, the shift opens a new front in the AI arms race — not only in faster chips, but in how much data those chips can store and move. 2026-02-10 16:29:07 -
Samsung Elec gets head start in HBM4 race, SK hynix plays it cool SEOUL, February 09 (AJP) - Samsung Electronics has moved a step ahead in the race to commercialize next-generation high-bandwidth memory, shipping early samples of its HBM4 chips and preparing for mass supply, according to industry sources. In the sixth-generation memory standard expected to power future artificial intelligence accelerators from Nvidia and Google, Samsung appears to have gained an early edge over local rival SK hynix, which currently dominates the HBM market. A source familiar with the matter said Samsung completed sample shipments of HBM4 products to customers late last year and is now entering what amounts to the early commercialization phase. “Samples were already supplied by late December, and what comes next is essentially the process of shipping mass-produced products,” the source said. “Preparations for shipments are in the final stages.” The source added that delivery schedules remain closely tied to customers’ product road maps. “Even with detailed planning, schedules can shift depending on customers,” the person said. “But given the current situation, it would not be far off to view shipments as starting after the Lunar New Year holiday.” If Samsung begins commercial supply ahead of competitors, it would become the first memory maker to move HBM4 beyond the sample stage and into early customer shipments, industry officials said. Kim Deok Kee, a professor of electronic engineering at Sejong University, said Samsung would indeed be the first in the industry if it begins mass production ahead of its rivals. “There are only three major players in this market. Micron, Samsung Electronics, and SK hynix,” Kim said. “If Samsung moves first, it would be the first in the industry.” Kim said the early start carries symbolic weight for Samsung, which has lagged behind SK hynix in the HBM market. “Samsung has been playing catch-up in HBM, and taking the lead in HBM4 mass production could be seen as a chance to regain momentum,” he said. “It suggests the company has resolved key technical hurdles such as heat management.” SK Hynix Downplays Timing Gap SK hynix, however, has played down the significance of Samsung’s early move, saying it is already prepared for mass production and that supply timing ultimately depends on customers. “We announced last September that we had built a mass-production system after completing customer samples,” a company official said. “As for final supply, we and our competitors are at similar stages. It largely depends on customer timelines.” The company said it has finished sample deliveries and stands ready to move into full-scale supply once demand materializes, but declined to give a precise timetable. The contrasting messages reflect a shift in competition from technology development to commercialization speed, as chipmakers seek to align deliveries with Nvidia’s next-generation “Rubin” AI platform. Speed vs. Relationships Samsung is widely seen as leveraging its vertically integrated structure — spanning DRAM manufacturing, logic-die production and advanced packaging — to accelerate commercialization. HBM4 marks a major leap from the current HBM3E generation, doubling the input-output interface to 2,048 bits and sharply boosting bandwidth per stack. The upgrade is designed to ease the so-called “memory wall” that increasingly constrains AI system performance. SK hynix, meanwhile, continues to benefit from its long-standing partnership with Nvidia, built during the rapid expansion of HBM3 and HBM3E for AI workloads. Market Share Battle Intensifies SK hynix overtook Samsung as the world’s top memory supplier last year amid explosive demand for AI chips, driven largely by Nvidia’s platforms. In 2025, SK hynix generated 47.2 trillion won in chip operating profit on sales of 97.15 trillion won, compared with Samsung’s 24.9 trillion won. The three dominant memory makers — Samsung, SK hynix and Micron — which control most of the global memory supply, have sent memory prices across the board soaring as they increasingly shift capacity toward premium HBM products. Counterpoint Research estimates SK hynix will hold about 54 percent of the global HBM4 market this year, compared with 28 percent for Samsung and 18 percent for Micron. The firm previously put SK hynix’s HBM3 share at 62 percent in mid-2025. Investment banks also expect SK hynix to maintain its lead. Goldman Sachs forecasts the company will dominate HBM3 through at least 2026, while UBS estimates it could capture around 70 percent of HBM4 demand tied to next-generation AI platforms. Despite Samsung’s early push, SK hynix remains confident. “Our commercialization capabilities and product quality, which have earned customer trust, cannot be overtaken in a short period,” Song Hyun-jong, president of SK hynix’s corporate center, said during a recent earnings call. “As with HBM and HBM3, we aim to secure overwhelming leadership in HBM4.” Samsung Electronics shares closed at 166,400 won ($123), up 4.92 percent, while SK hynix ended at 887,000 won ($657), up 5.72 percent. 2026-02-09 15:42:56 -
Price war at home as K-beauty expands overseas SEOUL, February 04 (AJP) - The quality of K-beauty is no longer in question. With low entry barriers and easy access to standardized ingredients and manufacturing, producing cosmetics has become relatively simple. What now separates winners from losers is speed, packaging, branding and, increasingly, price. As Korean beauty brands continue to expand their global footprint — especially in the United States — competition at home is intensifying around affordability. While K-beauty has evolved from a viral trend into a major export industry, its fiercest battle is unfolding on domestic shelves. That rivalry is sharpening with the latest move by Musinsa, which said it will open the first standalone offline store for its private-label brand Musinsa Standard Beauty on Feb. 12 at Hyundai Department Store’s Mokdong branch in Seoul. The opening marks its formal entry into South Korea’s fast-growing ultra-low-priced cosmetics segment. The move places Musinsa in direct competition with Daiso, which has built a mass-market following around cosmetics priced mostly between 1,000 won and 5,000 won ($0.75 to $3.75). Daiso’s budget beauty line has become a magnet not only for local shoppers but also for foreign tourists seeking affordable K-beauty souvenirs. “Whenever I visit Korea, I clear out the Daiso cosmetics aisles with my credit card,” said Ashley Lee, a Korean American living in the United States. “My colleagues back home always ask me to bring back specific products.” According to Daiso, overseas card transactions across its stores jumped about 60 percent in 2025 from a year earlier. At its Myeongdong Station branch — one of the most popular locations for tourists — foreign card sales rose roughly 40 percent year-on-year from January to November. “The Myeongdong store is among our busiest for foreign visitors, and beauty products are our top-selling category there,” a company official said. Sales data underline how rapidly budget beauty has grown. At Asung Daiso, cosmetics sales surged 85 percent in 2023, 144 percent in 2024 and 70 percent in 2025, making the segment one of the fastest-expanding corners of Korea’s retail market. Larger players, including Olive Young and major hypermarkets, have since moved in, intensifying competition for value-conscious consumers. Musinsa is positioning itself squarely in that battleground. Its Musinsa Standard Beauty products are mostly priced between 3,900 won and 5,900 won ($2.90 to $4.40) — slightly above Daiso’s entry-level range but well below typical mid-priced offerings at health-and-beauty chains. The pricing reflects an effort to carve out a “value-for-money” niche rather than compete directly in premium branding. Its first beauty-only store will span about 30 square meters and showcase around 20 core products, suggesting a pilot format designed to test demand. “The Mokdong store features a dedicated space solely for our beauty line,” a Musinsa official said. “After launching ultra-low-priced products last September, transaction volumes grew rapidly, giving us confidence in this segment.” “In cosmetics retail, online and offline channels have to work together,” said Kim Ju Duk, a professor of the beauty industry department at Sungshin Women’s University. “When consumers can test products in person, it has a direct impact on purchase decisions, and that experience often leads to repeat purchases online later.” He added that Musinsa’s move could meaningfully lift sales. “Olive Young’s growth accelerated after it started running online and offline channels in parallel around 2017 and 2018. If Musinsa follows a similar path, this offline push could turn out to be a very effective strategy.” The company is treating the store as a testbed, citing Mokdong’s dense student population and surrounding academies as key factors. If successful, similar beauty-focused outlets could follow. The push comes as foreign demand increasingly shapes the K-beauty market. Retailers in districts such as Myeongdong and Seongsu report rising purchases by overseas visitors, many of whom favor lower-priced skincare and cosmetics for everyday use or gifts. Against that backdrop, analysts see Musinsa’s move as a bet that price competitiveness — not just trend-driven marketing — will define the industry’s next phase. “Foreign customers already account for about 25 percent of transactions for Musinsa Standard Beauty,” a company official said. “As our offline presence expands, exposure to overseas visitors will grow naturally.” The brand’s flagship stores, including its Myeongdong outlet, already draw roughly half of their customers from abroad, according to the company. With competitive pricing and manufacturing partnerships with firms such as Cosmax, Musinsa expects foreign demand to continue rising. Musinsa entered the private-label beauty business in 2021 with affordable functional products, but sharpened its strategy after forming a partnership with Cosmax in September last year. Since then, it has expanded its low-cost lineup and plans further collaborations, including with Dashu and LG Household & Health Care. Under its current roadmap, Musinsa aims to position Musinsa Standard Beauty as a sub-10,000-won value brand, while differentiating its other private labels — Oddtype and Whizzy — in color cosmetics. The company plans to focus on online channels at home and offline expansion overseas for those brands. While sales data from the Mokdong store are yet to emerge, broader market figures point to rising stakes. With Daiso posting triple-digit growth in some years and foreign demand adding momentum, the fight for Korea’s budget beauty consumers is no longer a sideshow. It is becoming one of the industry’s main fronts. 2026-02-04 15:24:12 -
LG Electronics showcases B2B solutions at North American, European trade shows SEOUL, February 04 (AJP) - LG Electronics is participating in major business-to-business trade shows in North America and Europe this week, presenting heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and commercial display solutions as it seeks to expand its B2B operations. The South Korean electronics maker exhibited HVAC solutions ranging from unitary systems to AI data center cooling technology at AHR EXPO 2026, North America's largest air conditioning trade show, which concludes on Wednesday in Orlando, Florida. LG Electronics displayed core HVAC components including compressors, motors, fan motors and drives at the event. The company also presented what it calls an "all-in-one component solution" that combines key air conditioning parts optimized for residential and commercial buildings. Separately, LG Electronics is presenting commercial display products and software solutions at ISE 2026, Europe's largest display trade show running through Friday in Barcelona, Spain. The exhibition includes the company's high-resolution "LG MAGNIT" signage, low-power "E-Paper" displays, and cloud-based software platforms such as LG ConnectedCare and LG SuperSign. LG Electronics' B2B revenue reached 24.1 trillion won ($18 billion) last year, accounting for more than 35 percent of total sales on a standalone basis. The company has set a target to increase the B2B share of revenue to 40 percent by 2030. The B2B business includes HVAC, automotive components and commercial displays. 2026-02-04 14:00:14 -
ASML's ambitious revenue target raise capacity upgrade room for memory chipmakers in AI heyday SEOUL, February 02 (AJP) - ASML’s ambitious revenue target signals greater room for scaling and production ramp-ups among chipmakers including Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, which together supply roughly 80 percent of the memory used in AI accelerators and hyperscale data centers. The outlook follows stronger-than-expected 2025 earnings from ASML, which reported total net sales of €32.7 billion ($38.8 billion), while fourth-quarter net bookings surged to €13.16 billion ($15.6 billion), more than double market expectations. The increase was driven largely by demand for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems, which are essential for manufacturing advanced chips used in artificial intelligence workloads. EUV tools accounted for about 56 percent of new bookings in the fourth quarter. ASML holds a de facto monopoly on EUV lithography, making its production capacity a structural constraint for the global semiconductor industry. Unlike conventional chipmaking equipment, EUV systems remain a tightly rationed resource due to their complexity and precision requirements. Annual EUV shipments have risen only gradually, from 26 units in 2019 to 42 units in 2021, 53 units in 2023 and an estimated 60–62 units in 2025. For 2026, ASML is targeting output of 70–80 units, its highest level to date, according to industry estimates. Even at that level, supply remains well below demand. Global chipmakers — including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Micron Technology and Intel — are competing aggressively for limited allocations, as capacity upgrades and technology transitions increasingly hinge on securing additional EUV machines. “Lithography tools are the most critical equipment in semiconductor manufacturing, regardless of whether the chips are for memory or logic,” said Lee Jong-hwan, a professor of system semiconductor engineering at Sangmyung University. “Because EUV systems are ultra-precision machines, only a limited number can be produced each year, which is why ASML’s annual output is measured in just several dozen units.” “In AI semiconductors, both memory and non-memory chips are essential,” he added. “The surge in EUV demand reflects how AI workloads are expanding across both segments. Given that advanced DRAM, including high-bandwidth memory, is now produced at around the 10-nanometer class in Korea, it is highly likely that Samsung Electronics and SK hynix have already secured reservations for sub-10nm EUV tools.” ASML’s decision to raise its 2026 revenue guidance to €34 billion–€39 billion is therefore widely interpreted as a sign that a substantial portion of next year’s EUV output has already been committed to leading customers, including Korean memory makers ramping up production of high-bandwidth memory and advanced DRAM for AI accelerators. The company has also doubled its long-term revenue target for 2030 to €60 billion ($71 billion), supported by the successful delivery of its first commercial-grade high–numerical aperture (High-NA) EUV system, the TWINSCAN EXE:5200B. Compared with standard EUV tools using a 0.33 numerical aperture, the High-NA system operates at 0.55NA, enabling nearly three times the transistor density — a critical advantage for next-generation AI processors. The first systems were delivered to SK hynix and Intel. With EUV tools costing well over $150 million each and available in limited numbers, competitiveness is increasingly determined not only by access, but by how efficiently chipmakers convert those investments into higher yields and faster production ramps. SK hynix, the world’s leading supplier of high-bandwidth memory for AI data centers, has already moved early. The company said it installed a production-ready High-NA EUV system at its M16 fab in Icheon in 2025. ASML also expects its exposure to China to decline as export controls tighten, with China’s revenue share projected to fall from about 33 percent in 2025 to around 20 percent in 2026. Rising demand from South Korea, Taiwan and the United States is expected to more than offset the decline. As global investment in AI infrastructure accelerates, ASML’s constrained EUV output is set to remain a key gatekeeper — turning access, execution and yield management into decisive variables for Korea’s memory chipmakers in the next phase of the semiconductor cycle. 2026-02-02 14:39:16 -
Foreign workers missing after deadly factory fire in South Korea SEOUL, January 31 (AJP) - A massive fire at a household goods factory in South Korea left at least one foreign worker dead and another missing, authorities said on Saturday, highlighting ongoing safety concerns involving migrant labor in the country’s manufacturing sector. The blaze broke out at around 2:55 p.m. on Friday at a factory in Eumseong County, North Chungcheong Province, which produces sanitary products such as wet wipes and diapers. Firefighters declared the fire fully extinguished after more than 21 hours of operation, battling structural collapses and intense heat fueled by highly flammable materials inside the facility. Of the 83 workers on site at the time, 81 managed to evacuate. However, two foreign nationals — a Nepali man in his 20s and a Kazakh man in his 50s — were initially unaccounted for. One body, believed to be one of the missing workers, was discovered early Friday near a stairwell on the second floor of the building. Authorities have transferred the remains to a local funeral home and requested forensic identification. The second worker remained missing as of Friday afternoon, with rescue teams continuing searches using heavy equipment and urban detection devices amid unstable debris. Investigators said both missing workers were subcontracted employees responsible for waste processing inside the production building, working on the ground floor where the fire is believed to have originated. Fire officials said the factory’s sandwich-panel structure and large volumes of combustible pulp materials caused the flames to spread rapidly, complicating rescue efforts and forcing overnight suspensions due to collapse risks. Police have launched a serious industrial accident investigation and plan to examine whether safety management protocols were properly followed once on-site recovery is completed. The incident has renewed scrutiny over working conditions faced by foreign laborers in South Korea’s industrial sector, where migrant workers are often employed through subcontractors in high-risk environments. 2026-01-31 17:44:31 -
Korea signs $1bn-plus Chunmoo rocket deal with Norway SEOUL, January 31 (AJP) - South Korea has secured a major defense export deal with Norway, with presidential chief of staff Kang Hoon-sik saying in a Facebook post on Saturday that the Norwegian government had signed a contract to purchase the Chunmoo multiple rocket launcher system. The contract is worth about 1.3 trillion won ($970 million). Kang Hoon-sik, chief of staff to President Lee Jae-myung, said the agreement was finalized following approval by the Norwegian government and parliament, marking South Korea’s largest-ever arms export to a Nordic country. The deal comes after Norway selected Hanwha Aerospace as the preferred bidder for its long-range precision fire system (LRPFS) program, estimated at 19 billion Norwegian kroner ($1.8 billion), with the Chunmoo system forming the core of the package. Kang, who is visiting Norway as a special presidential envoy for strategic economic cooperation, said the contract follows months of high-level discussions with Norwegian defense and foreign affairs officials. 2026-01-31 14:36:57