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Posco sells stake in Chinese stainless steel mill: sources
Posco Holdings Inc., the holding company of South Korea's leading steelmaker Posco, has sold its entire stake in a Chinese stainless steel joint venture for around 400 billion won ($291 million), industry sources said Wednesday. According to the sources, Posco Holdings had signed a preliminary deal to sell its 82.5 percent stake in the Zhangjiagang Pohang Stainless Steel (PZSS) steel mill to China's Qingshan Group, the No.1 stainless steelmaker there. PZSS, set up in China's eastern Jiangsu prov
July 9, 2025 -
Russian foreign minister to visit North Korea this week in latest sign of expanding ties
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will travel to North Korea for a three-day visit beginning Friday in the latest sign of the countries’ deepening ties during Russia’s war in Ukraine, state media reported. North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said Lavrov was invited by the country’s Foreign Ministry but did not immediately provide further details, including whether he would meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Lavrov’s visit follows a June trip by Russia’s top security of
July 9, 2025 -
LG’s new AI slashes genetic testing time to under 1 minute
LG AI Research on Wednesday unveiled its next-generation artificial intelligence model, Exaone Path 2.0, which can diagnose diseases by analyzing patients’ pathology images alone. This new AI model is expected to drastically reduce the time required for genetic testing from two weeks to under one minute, marking a step forward in the early diagnosis of diseases such as cancer. Exaone Path 2.0 has been upgraded from the first edition, trained on higher-quality data. It offers enhanced capabilitie
July 9, 2025 -
Samsung’s Q2 profit falls short as chip slump, tariffs take toll
Samsung Electronics forecast its earnings to fall significantly short of market expectations in the second quarter this year, dragged down by weak semiconductor sales, unexpected inventory-related costs and growing uncertainties including US tariffs. In its earnings guidance Tuesday, the tech giant predicted its consolidated sales to post 74 trillion won ($54.1 billion) for the April-June period, down 0.09 percent on-year. The operating profit estimate plunged 55.9 percent to post at around 4.6
July 8, 2025 -
LG Electronics eyes data center boom to power HVAC growth
LG Electronics on Tuesday unveiled its ambitious plan to expand its heating, ventilation and air conditioning business to 20 trillion won ($14.6 billion) in annual sales by 2030, positioning it as a key growth driver in the business-to-business sector amid the accelerating rise of AI infrastructure. "HVAC demand is skyrocketing in the AI era," Lee Jae-sung, president of the eco solution division at LG Electronics, said in a press briefing in Seoul. “Until now, we’ve focused on residential and co
July 8, 2025 -
SKT loses 800,000 subscribers amid fallout from hacking scandal
SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest telecommunications firm by market share, is facing mounting fallout from a massive cyberattack, with subscriber churn accelerating despite the company’s compensation measures, such as allowing customers to cancel their contracts early without penalty. While the company may retain its No. 1 position for now, its market dominance is increasingly under threat, with over 800,000 subscribers having already left as of the end of last month. As rival carriers ramp up e
July 7, 2025 -
LG Electronics Q2 profit nearly halved as US tariffs bite
LG Electronics' preliminary operating profit plunged nearly 50 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, coming in below market forecasts as the South Korean tech giant grappled with US tariffs and weakening demand. In its earnings guidance Monday, the company said it expects to post an operating profit of 639.1 billion won ($467 million) for the April-June period, marking a 46 percent drop from the same period last year. Revenue slipped 4 percent on-year to 20.74 trillion won. The resu
July 7, 2025 -
Elon Musk posts in Korean for the first time with viral AI meme
Elon Musk surprised many last week by posting in Korean on social media for the first time. The unexpected reply came on July 3 after Musk shared a meme highlighting the intensifying rivalry among top AI companies. The meme, posted on X (formerly Twitter), is based on a scene from the American series Person of Interest. It shows three characters from the series labeled as AI firms or products — Anthropic, Cursor, and Musk’s own xAI — aiming weapons at each other in a chain, while all of them are
July 7, 2025 -
SKT unveils W1tr post-hack plan after government probe
SK Telecom on Friday pledged a sweeping 1 trillion won ($720 million) compensation and cybersecurity initiative, including penalty-free contract cancellations, after a government probe concluded the carrier was negligent in a hacking attack that exposed nearly 10 gigabytes of sensitive subscriber data. “I offer my deepest and sincerest apologies. I stand here today with profound remorse and reflection,” SKT CEO Ryu Young-sang said, bowing during an emergency press briefing after the government’s
July 4, 2025 -
SKT's negligence led to massive hacking, ministry confirms
The South Korean government concluded Friday that SK Telecom failed to take proper action to prevent its massive hacking attack, leaking about 10 gigabytes of sensitive subscriber data as early as August 2021. Authorities ordered the company to allow customers to cancel contracts without paying early termination penalties, a move that could potentially cost the telecom giant billions of won. The Ministry of Science and ICT announced the results of a joint public-private investigation, confirming
July 4, 2025 -
Ex-Naver CEO to reap W4b from stock options before minister role
Han Sung-sook, South Korea’s nominee for Minister of SMEs and Startups and former Naver CEO, has decided to exercise 60,000 stock options that could earn her about 4 billion won ($2.93 million), industry sources said Thursday. Han recently filed documents with Naver to exercise the stock options she received, 20,000 in 2019, and 40,000 in 2020. These 60,000 options, at their exercise prices, are worth about 10 billion won and will convert to shares on July 10. Once confirmed as minister, she pla
July 4, 2025 -
AI demand spurs chip giants’ facility growth
South Korean semiconductor giants are ramping up facility investments to expand their future market share, encouraged by upbeat projections of explosive growth in the artificial intelligence chip sector. Samsung Electronics is reviewing plans to restart construction of new chip manufacturing plants in Korea, while SK hynix recently began construction of a new back-end processing facility. According to industry sources Thursday, Samsung is preparing to resume the construction of the Pyeongtaek Ca
July 3, 2025 -
KT upgrades Korean LLM, eyes sovereign AI lead
Korean telecommunications giant KT Corp. on Thursday unveiled its upgraded large language model, Mi:dm 2.0, optimized for the Korean language, expressing its commitment to expanding the open-source artificial intelligence ecosystem and participating in the government’s sovereign AI initiative. “KT seeks to embed four key principles across all domains of AI: data sovereignty, user choice, Korean values and responsible operations,” said Shin Dong-hoon, chief AI officer at KT, during an online pres
July 3, 2025 -
Samsung bets on Nvidia to reclaim HBM lead
Samsung Electronics Vice Chair Jun Young-hyun, who oversees the company’s semiconductor business, has traveled to the US to meet with Nvidia, fueling expectations that Samsung could narrow the gap with competitors and win new orders for high bandwidth memory chips. According to industry sources on Wednesday, Jun visited Nvidia last week to discuss the supply of Samsung’s fifth-generation HBM3E 12-layer products for the GPU maker's Blackwell Ultra GB300, as well as their foundry partnership. This
July 2, 2025 -
Samsung completes development of 6th-gen DRAM
Samsung Electronics has completed development of its sixth-generation DRAM, based on an advanced 10 nm-class process, moving closer to mass-producing its next-generation HBM4 memory. The tech giant finalized the development of its sixth-generation DRAM on Monday and received production readiness approval, a key internal milestone indicating that the product meets all criteria for mass production readiness, according to industry sources familiar with the matter on Tuesday. The 10 nm-class DRAM pr
July 1, 2025