Hotel Lotte won the operational right for a downtown duty-free shop in Jeju, officials said Friday, a move that is anticipated to bolster the company's footing in the South Korean resort island's ballooning duty-free market. Hotel Lotte, among the three applicants that submitted competing bids, will operate one of the island's two downtown duty-free facilities for foreigners for five years, acco...

South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. said Friday it will not merge with Samsung Medison Co., its healthcare arm, five months after the handset maker said it was "considering" doing so. "Our company has no plan to merge with Samsung Medison, or split off the medical business," the tech firm said in a regulatory filing. Samsung Medison, a local manufacturer of medical devices, became a ...

South Korea's top tech firm Samsung Electronics Co. said Thursday it has decided to freeze pay for its employees for 2015, as the world's No.1 handset maker struggles to bounce back from a slump in its mainstay mobile business that ate into overall profits. A Samsung official earlier told Yonhap that the company plans to fix this year's salaries, although overall performance incentives, which de...

Daum Kakao Corp., South Korea's top mobile messenger and web portal operator, said Tuesday it will work with local game developers to tap into mobile publishing in China in a bid to expand its footing in the world's most populous country. The company plans to set up a task force in Seoul and at its Beijing-based office in the first half to help local game developers publish their mobile game app...

E-mart, South Korea's biggest discount chain, said Tuesday it is launching sales at an Alibaba-powered online shopping mall, its latest effort to revive retail footing in the world's second-largest economy after previous expansion attempts flopped. Starting mid-March, E-mart will sell some 100 food and electronic products, such as soybean paste and rice cookers, at Tmall Global, an online shoppi...

Samsung Electronics and Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday they have decided to end their yearslong patent fee dispute but declined to provide details on the conditions of the agreement. "Samsung and Microsoft are pleased to announce that they have ended their contract dispute in U.S. court, as well as the International Chamber of Commerce arbitration. Terms of the agreement are confidential," the two...

Dessert cafe franchise Sulbing said Monday it plans to open 150 branches in the world's second-largest economy by 2017, joining in a legion of South Korean food producers and confectioneries that have expanded abroad to secure new growth engines. Sulbing has signed a deal with China's Shanghai Yabin Food Stuff Trade Co. to open two branches in Shanghai by April and have 150 branches across the c...

The recent stake sale by Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Mong-koo and his son in Hyundai Glovis Co. is "credit positive" as it reduces the risks from upcoming toughened government penalties on intra-group transactions, a main revenue source for the logistics unit, a global credit appraiser said Monday. On Friday, Hyundai Motor Group said that its chairman and his son, Eui-sun, sold about 5 mi...

South Korea's chip giant SK hynix Inc. said Monday it has started supplying its up-to-date memory chip for LG Electronics Inc.'s new flagship smartphone lineup, in its latest push to grab a bigger market share with the new mobile component as it vies against home rival Samsung Electronics Co. The low-power double data rate 4, an 8-gigabit dynamic random access memory mainly produced for mobile p...

Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co., South Korea's No. 2 builder, said Monday it has won a $126 million project to lay power transmission lines in Saudi Arabia. Hyundai E&C will build 249 kilometers of a 380-kilovolt transmission line throughout the Saudi capital of Riyadh, the South Korean builder said. The deal was struck with the Saudi Electricity Company. "The latest project comes as the...

South Korea's No. 2 chipmaker SK hynix Inc. saw its share of the NAND flash market rise in the fourth quarter of 2014 from three months earlier, narrowing its gap with industry leader Samsung Electronics Co., data showed Sunday. SK hynix saw its market share reach 11.4 percent in the October-December period, up 1.1 percentage points from the 10.3 percent posted a quarter earlier, the data by mar...

Lee Kun-hee, the de-facto head of South Korea's top family-controlled conglomerate Samsung Group, earned the most amount of dividends among local businessmen last year, data showed Sunday, helped by the government's pressure on listed firms to expand returns to shareholders. Lee, who has been hospitalized since May after suffering a heart attack, earned 178.8 billion won ($164 million) in 2014, ...

South Korea's Samsung Group was named as the third-most reputable firm in the United States, a report showed Sunday, on the back of its strong products and services appealing to American consumers. Being the only foreign company to be included in the top-10 list, only two firms, grocery-chain operator Wegmans Food Markets Inc. and e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc., outperformed Samsung in terms o...

The profit portion of South Korea's tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. among its listed group affiliates declined last year from a year earlier as the smartphone maker reported the weakest earnings in three years, data showed Thursday. The tech firm -- the flagship unit of the country's top conglomerate, Samsung Group -- posted 25 trillion won ($22.9 billion) in operating profit for the January-...