news highlight

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  Korea's Jan exports up 34% on doubled chip shipments, trade surplus streak for 1-year SEOUL, February 01 (AJP) -South Korea’s exports jumped more than 30 percent in January from a year earlier, extending their on-year growth streak to eight consecutive months, driven by steamy semiconductor shipments. Exports totaled $65.85 billion, up 33.9 percent from a year earlier, marking the highest January figure on record, according to data released Sunday by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. Semiconductor exports, the country’s top export item, more than doubled f February 1, 2026
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  UPDATE: Korea's factory output strongest in four months in December, slows for full 2025 *Updated with additional information and market response SEOUL, January 30 (AJP) - South Korea’s factory output grew at its fastest pace in four months in December, driven by chip-led exports and a sharp rebound in construction, though growth slowed for full-year 2025 amid prolonged weakness in building activity. Mining and manufacturing production rose 1.7 percent from the previous month, rebounding from two consecutive contractions and accelerating from a 0.8 percent gain in November, January 30, 2026
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  South Korean equities log rare double win as decoupling fears grow SEOUL, January 28 (AJP) - South Korean equities are logging a rare double win, with both the main KOSPI and the tech-heavy KOSDAQ hitting historic highs, but the synchronized rally is increasingly stirring anxiety that markets are pulling away from economic reality. The benchmark KOSPI climbed to 5,170.81 on Wednesday, setting a fresh record, while the KOSDAQ advanced to 1,133.52. Both indices are up about 20 percent so far this year, extending last year’s outsized gains of 76 percent for January 28, 2026
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  KOSPI's bull run pushes South Korea to world's 10th-largest stock market SEOUL, January 28 (AJP) - South Korea's benchmark KOSPI continued its bull run, closing at 5,170.81, while the junior KOSDAQ also finished above the 1,100 level at 1,133.52. The weeks-long rally that began at the start of the new year has lifted South Korea's stock market to a valuation of $3.25 trillion, surpassing Germany's $3.22 trillion and making it the world's 10th-largest stock market, just behind Taiwan, according to Bloomberg's compiled data. Wednesday's rally January 28, 2026
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  Korean large firms turn confident about business prospects for the first time in nearly 4 yrs SEOUL, January 27 (AJP) -South Korea’s large manufacturers — most of them export-oriented — turned optimistic about business conditions on strong orders in semiconductors and shipbuilding, even as overall business sentiment softened at the start of 2026, a Bank of Korea survey showed Tuesday. The business sentiment index for large manufacturing firms rose to 101.8 in January, up from 97.7 a month earlier, marking the first time the reading topped the neutral 100 threshold in th January 27, 2026
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  Vietnam stays South Korea's No. 3 trading partner for fourth year SEOUL, January 26 (AJP) - Vietnam remained South Korea’s third-largest trading partner for a fourth consecutive year as South Korean exports topped $700 billion for the first time last year, according to government and industry data released on Monday. Vietnam also generated South Korea’s second-largest trade surplus, after the United States. South Korea’s exports to Vietnam rose 7.6 percent from a year earlier to $62.8 billion in 2025, data from the Ministry of Trade, Indust January 26, 2026
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  Korea's two largest chipmakers to report earnings and HBM plans on same day this week SEOUL, January 26 (AJP) - Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, the world's two largest memory makers based in South Korea, are set to report record earnings on the same day - Thursday - this week in full display of the strength of the current semiconductor upcycle. Instead of numbers, the market would be watching what the leading chipmakers would reveal about their high-bandwidth memory (HBM) strategies and capacity plans during conference calls. It will be the first time the two companies January 26, 2026
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  Korea tops Japan in exports, but growth engine overly reliant on chips SEOUL, Jan 23 (AJP) - East Asia emerged as the standout winner in global trade last year, with the region’s major exporters all setting new records as demand surged for artificial intelligence–related hardware. South Korea posted a record $709.5 billion in exports in 2025, up 3.8 percent from the previous year and overtaking Japan’s $696 billion in data released Thursday by Japan’s Ministry of Finance. It marked the first time South Korea surpassed Japan in total export January 23, 2026
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  OPINION: How data, engineers and state power drive China's tech rise Views of China tend to split neatly into two camps. One dismisses it as a country of imitators. The other fears it as an unstoppable technological juggernaut powered by a vast market and a disciplined state. Both views miss the same point. China’s defining advantage is scale. In a country of 1.4 billion people, even meaningful technological progress can appear underwhelming when measured per capita. But scale has a way of turning incremental gains into structural power. What looks modest January 23, 2026