SK Speedmate, an automotive maintenance company, announced Sunday its official launch after spinning off from SK Networks to become a top automotive aftermarket service provider in Korea. SK Networks decided to spin off the Speedmate division as part of its push to transition to an AI-centric company. The automotive maintenance business has been rebranded as SK Speedmate, and is now a full-owned subsidiary under the rental firm. SK owns 43.9 percent of SK Networks. “Utilizing our strong br

Industry Sept. 1, 2024

LG Display said Thursday it has kicked off mass production of its 27-inch 480Hz Quad HD gaming OLED panel that boasts the industry’s highest refresh rate and fastest response time, targeting the high-end gaming market. The new panel is made to show the best performance in key criteria for gaming displays, which are refresh rate, images displayed per second and response time in displaying graphic card signals, LG said. “We will create differentiated customer value and secure leadershi

Politics Aug. 29, 2024

The rise of explicit and nonconsensual deepfake pornography illegally being shared online is prompting Korean platform operators to boost their surveillance while delaying generative AI services. Naver, the country's No. 1 search engine, said Wednesday it is running Clova GreenEye 2.0 on its platforms to identify harmful and sexually explicit images using the image analysis solution based on its AI model's vision technology. While the solution is not specifically made to scan for deepf

Industry Aug. 28, 2024

Korea’s multibillion-dollar deal to build nuclear plants in the Czech Republic has been put at risk with US-based Westinghouse Electric Co. filing an appeal with the Czech's antimonopoly watchdog Tuesday, challenging Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power's position as the preferred bidder. "KHNP’s APR1000 and APR1400 plant designs utilize Westinghouse-licensed Generation II System 80 technology," Westinghouse said in its press release. "KHNP neither owns the underlying

Industry Aug. 27, 2024

Samsung Electro-Mechanics, the electronic parts manufacturing affiliate of Samsung Electronics, said Sunday it will ramp up the sales portion of high-end flip chip ball grid array (FCBGA) substrates for servers and artificial intelligence to over 50 percent by 2026. FCBGA is a semiconductor package substrate applied to high-performance semiconductors, such as central processing units and graphic processing units for servers and PCs. It can be used in various applications requiring high-performan

Industry Aug. 25, 2024

South Korea has set a goal to secure the most extensive free trade agreement network and to establish a risk management system to handle growing geopolitical uncertainties in a "super election" year, the Industry Ministry said Thursday while announcing the country's new trade policy roadmap. In a ministerial meeting on economic affairs, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo and other ministers reviewed the Yoon Suk Yeol administration's trade achievements of the past two years and intr

Industry Aug. 22, 2024

Korea's two top display makers Samsung Display and LG Display have won Display of the Year awards at the International Meeting on Information Display conference that kicked off on Jeju Island Wednesday. Having introduced the world’s first stretchable OLED display in 2017, Samsung unveiled another stretchable panel using the micro-LED technology that boasts the highest resolution and elongation rate among the stretchable products on the market. According to the display maker, the lates

Industry Aug. 21, 2024

While Samsung Electronics maintained its No. 1 position as a TV-maker in the first half of this year, Chinese rivals seem to be ramping up their game to close the gap. Market tracker Counterpoint Research said Monday that global TV shipments grew in the April-June period for the first time in four quarters, fueled by an Olympics spending spree. It reached 56 million units in the second quarter this year, up 3 percent on-year. Samsung took the largest share of 15 percent of total shipments, but i

Industry Aug. 19, 2024

SK hynix witnessed its sales in China and the US more than double to contribute to an overall growth in revenue in the first half of this year, according to the company’s half-year report Sunday. The world’s second-largest memory chip maker said it logged a total of 28.8 trillion won ($21.26 billion) in sales in the January-June period this year, marking a significant recovery from the 12.3 trillion won the company achieved in the same time last year. In this year's record, 55.4

Industry Aug. 18, 2024

Artificial intelligence startup Rebellions and Sapeon Korea officially signed a merger, signaling the birth of the country's first AI unicorn, SK Telecom, Sapeon Korea’s parent company, said Sunday. Rebellions, a fabless chip designer valued at 900 billion won ($664 million), and Sapeon Korea, the AI chip supplier for data centers valued at 550 billion won, have joined hands to carve out a spot in the global AI chip market that is currently dominated by US-based graphic processing uni

Industry Aug. 18, 2024

Top executives of South Korean conglomerates witnessed ups and downs in their paychecks in the first half of the year, with the semiconductors industry suffering the most drastic cuts due to lukewarm earnings, according to their half-year salary reports Wednesday. Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, the nation’s top two chipmakers, are considered among the highest-paying companies here. But their top executives suffered 20 to 30 percent cuts in their compensation amid a global downturn in ch

Industry Aug. 15, 2024

The nation's top two display-makers, Samsung Display and LG Display, unveiled Wednesday their latest cutting-edge organic light-emitting diode display technologies involving artificial intelligence and new form factors, in an apparent move to widen the gap with their Chinese runner-ups. At the K-Display Industry trade show taking place in Seoul this week, Korea Display Industry Association Chairman Choi Joo-sun underscored how Korean display-makers will keep ahead of Chinese rivals in the c

Industry Aug. 14, 2024

The latest boom in artificial intelligence is prompting competition among the world's top three memory-chip-makers to debut more power-efficient DRAM chips with higher capacity to power high-performance computing for AI applications. Chipmakers are focusing especially on the seventh-generation Low Power Double Data Rate 5X chip to be used not just in mobile devices, but also in the automotive industry. "As AI applications are diversifying, the demand for memory products consuming low p

Industry Aug. 13, 2024

Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics are stepping up efforts to carve out a share of the burgeoning robot vacuum market, which has been dominated by China's Roborock, with new machines designed to remove the pain points of existing products. This week, LG Electronics is rolling out its first all-in-one robot vacuum and mop machine in 21 years, since the company introduced its first such device in 2003. Samsung Electronics has also released a robot vacuum and mop combo machine adopting adv

Industry Aug. 12, 2024

Endless guesses are made over who will win the race to the White House between former US President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris, but both look likely to bolster the country's protectionist measures to boost the US' domestic industry. Against this backdrop, South Korea's second-largest conglomerate SK Group is beefing up its US offices to elevate negotiating power in the all-important market, where it has been spending heavily to secure a firmer footing for

Industry Aug. 11, 2024