• Foreign buyers line up to purchase houses in Turkey

    Wealthy people from the Middle East are lining up at the doors of real estate agents to buy houses in Turkey, Environment and Urban Development Minister Erdoğan Bayraktar said on Tuesday. As stated by the minister in Trabzon following a meeting on Sunday, rich buyers from countries such as Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have made down payments to contractors and…

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  • ‘Macquarie pursuing excessive gains’

    NGOs call for probe of ‘unfair’ subway deal costing taxpayers A civic coalition called for a full-scale investigation Tuesday to clear suspicions surrounding Macquarie’s investment in 2005 in the construction of Subway Line 9. It says then-Seoul Mayor,Lee Myung-bak, who is now President, was behind the contract that they claim…

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  • Business

    Free fall slide

    LG Chem, Kumho Petro tumble in stock market The local stock market has been highly volatile over the past few weeks amid lingering woes over the eurozone’s debt crisis and a slow recovery by major economies, including the United States. In this unstable market, domestic companies have shown quite contrasting…

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  • Business

    Reinventing business model

    SK chairman to maximize synergy among affiliates SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won is stepping up efforts to reinvent the group by redesigning its business portfolio and creating synergy among affiliates under new business line-up. The group’s recent takeover of Hynix Semiconductor, now SK hynix, was the first step for the…

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  • Business

    Naver’s monopoly challenged

    Local giant to cultivate collaborative ecosystem Over the past 13 years, the local search giant like Naver has focused on providing Korean-language content and serving the local audience. Unlike Google which originally specialized as a search engine that acted as a conduit of existing Web content, Naver started from scratch…

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  • Business

    Keangnam to develop infrastructure in Sri Lanka

    Keangnam Enterprises, a mid-size local construction company, is making a foray into the Sri Lankan market by helping the country develop its infrastructure. The firm said Sunday that its Chairman Sung Woan-jong agreed with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa to cooperate on infrastructure projects of the Southeast Asian country during…

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  • Business

    Wrong message

    Kakao Talk scrambles after service disruption Millions of smartphone users complained of disruption Saturday after Kakao Talk, the country’s leading instant messenger service for mobile Internet devices, was paralyzed for several hours. Kakao Talk, which boasts more than 40 million subscribers here, abruptly alerted its users around 2:50 p.m. that…

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  • North Face slapped with biggest price-fixing fine

    Korea’s best-selling U.S. outdoor clothing brand, The North Face, was slapped with a fine of 5.24 billion won ($4.62 million) for fixing prices of products available at its retail stores. It is the largest fine levied on a company for retail price fixing. The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said Sunday…

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  • Business

    Naver losing grip in Korea

    Portal firm’s growth potential ebbing away as it sticks to comfort zone Naver, Korea’s biggest Web portal, is losing its grip on the domestic market. The local search giant is being cornered, needing to diversify its business portfolio amid a rapid rise of social networking services (SNS), according to market…

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  • Business

    Plenty of bang for buck

    Samsung Electronics chalks up record profits on mobile sales Samsung Electronics posted its best quarterly operating profit during the first three months of this year and is expected to improve on it during the seasonally-favorable second quarter. The world’s biggest supplier of flat screens, memory chips and smartphones reported 45.27…

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