When Sungha Jung’s dad taught his 9-year-old son to play a basic C chord on the guitar, he didn’t expect that his son would soon be performing with global pop star Jason Mraz and guitar virtuosos Tommy Emmanuel and Kotaro Oshio. From ‘legendary guitarist’ to ‘the first Korean YouTuber with 1 million subscribers,’ Sungha is known for his unique journey as a guitarist and YouTuber. From behind th...

South Korean social startup Dot has been picked as the sole supplier of Braille tablet PCs for visually impaired students in the US, the company said Thursday. Through the exclusive contract with the US Department of Education, the Seoul-based startup will provide 30 billion won ($26.9 million) worth of Braille smart tablets, called Dot Pads, to the US schools for four years starting in 2022. T...

Delivery platform operator Barogo has secured 80 billion won ($71.7 million) through its series C funding round, the company said Thursday. The amount of the newly raised funds surpassed the firm’s initial target of 50 billion won, showing the increasing interest of investors in the booming delivery businesses. E-commerce firm 11st and retail conglomerate CJ Group have joined the funding round ...

South Korean asset management companies collectively earned record net profit in the first three months, according to data released by the state watchdog Financial Supervisory Service on Tuesday. The combined net profit of the 328 domestic asset management firms came in at 615 billion won ($551.74 million), up 424.7 percent from the same period last year. The growth is partly attributable to red...

Two-year apartment leases, known locally as jeonse, have jumped by some 44 percent in Seoul since the beginning of the current Moon Jae-in administration, data showed Monday. The average price of a two-year refundable lease on a high-rise apartment came in at 426.2 million won ($384,000) when the Moon administration began in May 2017, but the price had risen 44.2 percent to 614.5 million won as ...

In recent years South Korea has seen a surge in real estate investment deals that were thought to be speculative, but some market watchers say the country still lacks effective measures to prevent property speculation and the resulting price hikes. Data compiled by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport showed that foreign individuals owned 21.35 million square meters of land in the ...

Samsung Life Insurance has set up a plan to invest 20 trillion won ($17.98 billion) in financial projects linked to environmental, social and governance initiatives by 2030, the company said Thursday. After holding ESG meetings among executives recently, the insurer announced its long-term plan to make investments in renewable energy businesses and ESG bonds while cutting carbon emissions in hal...

Online-only KakaoBank has launched a task force to expand its lending services for customers with low and midrange credit scores, the company said Thursday. The bank is planning to roll out various loan services this year, lower interest rates for credit loans and increase credit lines, offering up to 70 million won ($62,927) for customers with low and midrange credit scores. In addition, its n...

Singer and actress IU has purchased a high-end villa unit in Cheongdam-dong, a posh district in Seoul, for 13 billion won ($11.7 million) in cash, according to news reports Wednesday. The singer bought a residential unit of Eterno Cheongdam, currently under construction by Hyundai Engineering & Construction, according to local news outlet Biz.Hankook. The 20-story villa with four floors undergro...

South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Korbit has launched a nonfungible token trading platform for the first time in the local crypto sector, the company said Monday. An NFT is a unit of data on a blockchain and represents ownership of unique digital items, such as images, sound files or text. An NFT contains data of the ownership history and the original author. As it offers royalty to the origi...

The South Korean government has thrown its weight behind plans to build exascale supercomputers by 2030 and nurture local talents in the sector, the finance minister said Friday. Exascale computing, a computer system that performs 1 quintillion operations per second, enables superspeed data analyses and simulations at that will pave the way for crucial discoveries in a wide range of fields, from...

Toss Securities, an online brokerage firm owned by fintech firm Viva Republica, said Friday that the number of stock trading accounts on its platform has surpassed 3 million. The 3 million accounts amount to around 30 percent of 9.14 million individual investors in the nation. Launched on Feb. 3, the company attracted new customers by running a series of promotional events. More than 1.7 millio...

An upward trend for apartment prices in Seoul has continued for 40 weeks in a row, since last June, according to the state-run Korean Real Estate Board on Thursday. Market experts say unstoppable apartment price increases in Gangnam have driven the growth, inflating home prices in other regions in and around Seoul. The rate of increase stayed between 0.1 percent and 0.2 percent during most of th...

Millennium Hilton Seoul, a five-star hotel in the middle of Seoul, is reportedly in talks with asset manager Igis Asset Management to sell its luxury establishment for 1 trillion won ($891.2 million), local media reported Tuesday. CDL Hotel Korea, a Korean branch of Singaporean investment company City Developments Limited and the largest shareholder of Millennium Hilton, is planning to let Igis ...

Average monthly rent in South Korea jumped more than 6 percent in the first three months of the year due to an increasing number of people switching from long-term jeonse contracts to monthly rentals, according to the nation’s statistics agency Statistics Korea on Monday. Households, including single-person ones, paid 328,000 won ($291) on average for rent in the first quarter, up from 308,000 w...