Samsung Electronics declares transition to renewables, zero carbon by 2050

Samsung Electronics said Thursday it has joined the RE100 initiative to set net-zero targets by 2050 and ensure the full use of renewable energy, making a major shift in the IT devices manufacturing giant that consumed the largest amount of electricity in the world. By pledging to use less electricity and reuse and recycle resources like plastic and water, the chips-to-consumer electronics giant aims to transition to 100 percent renewables for its operation, and at the same time become carbon ne

Sept. 15, 2022

Google, Meta fined W100b for illegal collection of personal data

The South Korean government has imposed a total of 100 billion won ($72 million) in fines against Google and Meta for illegally collecting and using personal information for customized advertisements, officials said Wednesday. The Personal Information Protection Commission under the Prime Minister's Office decided to impose fines of 69.2 billion won and 30.8 billion won against Google and Meta, respectively, after it held a plenary session earlier in the day. According to the PIPC’s inve

Sept. 14, 2022

Naver Z joins global alliance to fight online child abuse

Naver Z, the metaverse affiliate of South Korean IT giant Naver, has joined the Tech Coalition to fight online sexual abuse and exploitation of children, the company said Wednesday. Established as a voluntary working group in 2006, the Tech Coalition is a global alliance of technology companies that have come together to better detect, report, remove and prevent online child sexual abuse. With Naver Z becoming the newest member of the alliance, there are now 28 companies including Amazon, Appl

Sept. 14, 2022

Lee Jae-yong heads for Panama, first importer of Samsung's color TV

Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong has visited Panama to hold talks with Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo and meet Samsung executives there, the tech giant said Wednesday. The isthmus country, which connects Central and South America, was the first importer of Samsung Electronics' color TVs in 1977, and is home to Samsung's oldest overseas office. Lee, heir to South Korea's largest conglomerate dedicated to electronics, construction and finance, met President Cortizo at Heron'

Sept. 14, 2022

World's largest OLED TV set for local release on Sept. 21

LG Electronics said Wednesday it plans to release the world's largest 97-inch premium television using the flat-panel organic light-emitting diode display for home cinema experience in South Korea on Sept. 21. Dubbed the LG OLED evo Gallery Edition, the massive TV measures more than 2.4 meters across. The ultralarge TV will feature a 4K resolution and Dolby's cutting-edge vivid video format Dolby Vision IQ and surround sound technology Dolby Atmos. LG’s alpha 9 Gen 5 intelligent processors

Sept. 14, 2022

Hanmi Pharmaceutical scores 1st US FDA approval

Hanmi Pharmaceutical has scored its first approval from the US Food and Drug Administration with its novel biomedicine Rolontis. Rolontis -- Hanmi Pharmaceutical's treatment for neutropenia, a disease that occurs when a specific type of white blood cells is lacking so that the body cannot fight infections, especially those caused by bacteria -- was given the FDA’s approval on Friday, according to the Korean firm’s US partner Spectrum Pharmaceuticals’ announcement. Neutropenia's

Sept. 13, 2022

LG, Parsons come together for AI-generated design projects

  LG Corp. and Parsons School of Design will collaborate to combine contemporary art and design practices with artificial intelligence technology, LG's tech arm LG AI Research said Tuesday. LG AI Research, which runs a hyperscale AI platform called Exaone, will carry out joint research projects for advanced AI technologies and emerging research domains with experts in fashion, design and media at Parsons for three years. Through the partnership, artists and designers will explore the inters

Sept. 13, 2022

SK-backed AI chip outperforms Nvidia's GPU

Sapeon, an artificial intelligence-powered chip designer backed by South Korea's SK Group, unveiled Tuesday a test result that its first commercialized product X220 has outperformed US graphic processor giant Nvidia's newest product A2. The chips for data centers in two varieties, X220-Compact and X220-Enterprise, were both superior to Nvidia's A2 in terms of AI processing speed and power consumption, according to a benchmark test result in MLPerf's inference. The large-scale AI cloud service pe

Sept. 13, 2022

[Herald Interview] ‘Huge amount of future will be happening through Asia’

Grand plans laid out by Seoul and Busan show how South Korea will play a major role as Asia's influence grows, according to futurist Richard Yonck. “One of the things that are very apparent to me is that a huge amount of the future is going to be happening through Asia,” Yonck, founder of Intelligent Future Consulting, told The Korea Herald in Seoul on Sept. 5. Mentioning the Seoul Vision 2030 plan and the government efforts to host the 2030 World Expo in Busan, the futurist said t

Sept. 13, 2022

Memory down cycle to unseat Samsung

Samsung Electronics is projected to see a 19 percent drop in quarterly sales during the July-September period, which will drop the tech giant to the second place in the world's semiconductor market by sales following Taiwan-based foundry company TSMC's swift rise to the top, data showed Monday. The third-quarter revenue of Samsung's chip business -- which oversees memory products, foundry services and non-memory products like mobile processors -- is forecast to amount to $18.29 billion, down 19

Sept. 12, 2022

Samsung chief visits Mexico during Chuseok holiday

Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong has held talks with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador Thursday and visited key locations of Samsung's business ranging from electronics to construction during the four-day Chuseok holiday in South Korea, the tech giant said Monday. During the talks, the 54-year-old discussed Samsung Electronics' current business affairs in Mexico and the long-term partnership with Samsung and Mexican companies, while expressing an appreciation

Sept. 12, 2022

[From the Scene] China’s TCL no longer an underdog

BERLIN -- At this year’s IFA trade show in Berlin, the world’s top two TV makers -- Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics -- both stressed that they will focus on upgrading the user experience and not the hardware itself. The South Korean tech rivals said they aimed to meet different consumer demands, especially those of younger generations, by offering more diverse products like a rotating TV for horizontal viewing or a bendable TV for gamers. Their emphasis on user experience is a

Sept. 10, 2022

HLB’s anticancer drug candidate shows world’s longest survival duration against liver cancer

HLB’s precision cancer drug Rivoceranib has demonstrated the world’s longest median overall survival, or mOS, in phase 3 clinical trials of liver cancer, the South Korean biopharmaceutical company said Thursday. According to HLB, Rivoceranib’s mOS recorded 22.1 months to mark the first drug in the world to break the 20-month barrier against liver cancer. The company earlier released the abstract of phase 3 concomitant clinical trials of Rivoceranib and anticancer drug Camreli

Sept. 8, 2022

SK Bioscience applies for SKYCovione's WHO emergency use listing

SK Bioscience has completed the application for an emergency use listing of SKYCovione -- South Korea’s first homemade COVID-19 vaccine -- with the World Health Organization, the local vaccine developer said Thursday. The WHO’s emergency use listing is the global health body’s procedure for reviewing vaccines, therapeutics and in vitro diagnosis with the goal of expediting the availability of such products to people in case of a public health emergency. As the WHO’s asse

Sept. 8, 2022

[Herald Interview] 'COVID-19 is not over; people are still getting sick'

It has been almost 1,000 days since the first case of COVID-19 was reported from Wuhan, China, at the end of December 2019. The unprecedented pandemic swept the world. Humanity fought back fiercely. The world now appears to have an upper hand over the novel coronavirus as borders are crossed and masks are taken off. However, a global expert on immune therapies and vaccines says the COVID-19 pandemic is not done yet. “Everyone wishes (the pandemic) would go away but it really hasn’t

Sept. 8, 2022

[From the scene] Samsung's new Pyeongtaek fab ready to embrace chip design ambitions

PYEONGTAEK, Gyeonggi Province -- South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics is ready to meet the needs of the world's most ambitious chip designers technology-wise in the world's largest single chip fabrication plant. The multi-story factory, which went operational in July, used enough steel bars to build 29 Eiffel Towers to complete the construction on a plot of land about 25 times the size of a soccer field. The gargantuan facility, dubbed P3, is the first chip fab to have introduce

Sept. 7, 2022

Hongik Univ. students win top James Dyson Awards

The James Dyson Foundation, global home appliance company Dyson's charity arm, announced Wednesday the local recipients of the James Dyson Awards 2022, an engineering competition held both locally and internationally to provide opportunities for young engineers to showcase their ideas on a global stage. Of the 125 entries, a team of students from Hongik University took first place for designing a rotating safety hook. When temporary scaffolding is raised at construction sites, there are poi

Sept. 7, 2022

SK hynix to spend W15tr on new memory chip fab in Cheongju by 2025

South Korean memory chip giant SK hynix announced on Tuesday plans to build a new memory chip fab in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province by early 2025 and spend 15 trillion won ($10.9 billion) in the next five years on the new site. The new two-story fab on 60,000 square meters of land, called M15X, will start construction in October. The new plant will be an expansion of the existing M15 line built in 2018. SK hynix said the memory product manufactured by the new fab has yet to be determined

Sept. 6, 2022

Samsung families receive W235.5b in dividend in H1

Four family members of South Korea's largest conglomerate, including Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong, have received a combined 235.46 billion won ($171.4 million) in dividends from Samsung Electronics in the first half, data showed Tuesday. Among them, Hong Ra-hee, Samsung Electronics' de facto leader Lee's mother and wife of the late ex-Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee, fetched 84.82 billion won in dividend income, outsizing Lee's 70.43 billion won and that of his

Sept. 6, 2022

Tmax Group to launch tool that builds app without writing code

South Korean enterprise software developer Tmax Group on Tuesday unveiled plans to launch a tool through which enterprise clients can build business apps tailored to their own needs without writing code. SuperApp Studio, an app-building tool that Tmax believes can become a Korean equivalent to Microsoft's Power App or Amazon's HoneyCode, will be designed to allow people without knowledge of programming languages to skirt technology barriers in the app development process without hiring

Sept. 6, 2022