South Korea’s service industry has witnessed rapid growth in many aspects, including scale of economy and employment, over the past five years, outperforming the manufacturing sector. The number of employees working for 330 listed companies in the country’s seven major service industries like tourism, education, medical service, finance, and software, surpassed 274,760 last year, up 46.5 percent...

State-run railroad operator KORAIL is set to mark the 40th anniversary of the opening of Seoul’s subway system Friday. As of August 2014, KORAIL operates 12 subway lines that speed through 228 stations, up from just three subway lines and 29 stations when it started its service in 1974. KORAIL’s subway trains run 2,454 times a day, carrying more than 3 million passengers. The total travel dista...

The number of viewers who have seen “Roaring Currents” exceeded 10 million on Sunday, just 12 days after its premiere, marking the fastest time for a film screened in Korea to hit the box office milestone. The period action flick centers on the historic Battle of Myeongnyang in 1592 at the dawn of the Japanese invasion of Korea (1592-1598), in which Adm. Yi Sun-sin uses brilliant strategy to def...

Chinese yuan-denominated deposits at banks in South Korea hit a record high as banks offered higher interest rates on savings accounts for consumers, according to Korea’s central bank. Meanwhile, those of the U.S. dollar fell sharply last month, the Bank of Korea data showed. Renmibi deposits amounted to $16.2 billion, accounting for almost 26 percent of the total foreign currency deposits as o...

Korea’s top 10 conglomerates may have to pay an additional 1.1 trillion won ($1.06 billion) in taxes under a new tax scheme that aims to make local companies raise their dividend payouts, capital spending and salaries for their workers, data showed. The Finance Ministry unveiled a set of tax revisions Wednesday to boost domestic demand. Under the new scheme, companies with paid-in capital of 50 ...

Some 3 percent of the active soldiers in South Korea have received treatment for mental and behavioral disorders from 2011 to 2013, military medical officials said Wednesday. A total of 19,066 soldiers out of some 650,000 men and women in uniform in the Korean military were treated for the cited diseases, according to a report by the Armed Forces Medical Command. Of the 2,158 soldiers initially...

Around 574,000 Chinese tourists visited Korea in June this year, making up 45 percent of the total foreign visitors that month, according to data by Tourism Knowledge and Information System and banking investment firms. The ratio of Chinese women came to 59.6 percent in January and up to 63.2 percent in June, accounting for 305,886 among the 483,934 total Chinese tourists. It is approximately do...

An Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 700 people in West Africa is moving faster than efforts to control the disease, the head of the World Health Organization warned as presidents from the affected countries met Friday in Guinea’s capital. Dr. Margaret Chan, the WHO’s director-general, said the meeting in Conakry “must be a turning point” in the battle against Ebola, which is now sickenin...

Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s top maker of smartphones, said Thursday its second-quarter net profit fell 19.5 percent from a year earlier after its mainstay handset business suffered a decline amid rising global competition. Net income came to 6.25 trillion won ($6.1 billion) in the April-June period, compared with 7.77 trillion won a year earlier, the company said in a regulatory filing....

A South Korean CEO serves for an average of 2.6 years, which is shorter than the minimum of three years endorsed by the country’s commercial law, according to data from corporate tracker CEO Score on Wednesday. The data showed that 367 chief executives, who accounted for 63.7 percent of the 576 executives surveyed, stepped down after less than three years. Another 102, or 17.7 percent, stayed on...

The Big Mac index for South Korea rose to 4.0, up from 3.47 early this year, according to data released by The Economist on Tuesday. The index for South Korea was the 28th highest among 57 countries, based on the July 23 exchange rate of 1,023 won against the U.S. greenback. The Big Mac index, introduced by The Economist in 1986, evaluates exchange rates by comparing the prices of Big Macs in di...

Members of South Korea’s younger generation are likely to receive less than what they paid into public benefits, a report showed Monday, highlighting the government’s demographic dilemma of having to balance its fiscal policy amid a rapidly aging society that is spurring welfare spending. People in their 20s and 30s during their lifetime will spend 100 million won ($97,561) more than the value o...