14 stories

Business

Chaebol, chips, and the Korean economy

In April, Nongshim Cut Prices to Help With Inflation. In August It Raised Them, Using the Same Sentence.

Korea's biggest noodle company cut sixteen products in the spring, framed as joining the government's price-stability drive. Four months later it raised forty-three, framed as joining the government's price-stability drive. The products it cut are precisely the ones it left alone in August — and its own filings show the cost pressure it blames has not yet reached its margins. The awkward part is that the cost pressure is real.

13 min read

Business

Korea's Longest Apartment Name Is 25 Characters — Seven Longer Than the Joke

Everyone says the names got long so mothers-in-law couldn't find the address. Twenty years of Korean and English coverage repeat that, and not once does anyone say it in the first person. Here is what actually happened: a decoder ring for 센트럴 and 포레, a Swedish word from a company with no Swedish business, and a 2021 study showing the thing residents vote hardest for doesn't work.

12 min read

Business

Korea Has Fewer Chicken Shops Than McDonald's Has Restaurants — the Famous Claim Was Counting Beer Halls

The number everyone quotes comes from a 2019 bank report whose own footnote says it includes 호프/통닭 licences and differs from the official count. On the like-for-like series the comparison is now the wrong way round. Four government bodies count Korean chicken shops four ways, two of them moving in opposite directions in the same year — and a decree amended last week finally requires the shops that closed to appear in the revenue forecast you're handed before you sign.

15 min read

Business

Korea Has Spent 26 Years Deleting Its Corporate Ladder. It Keeps Rebuilding It.

CJ abolished job titles in 2000 and never went back — but the business cards still printed the rank. POSCO and Naver have each now demolished and restored the same hierarchy twice. A look at the 사원-대리-과장-차장-부장 ladder, why 'General Manager' is a mistranslation, and the survey number that everyone quotes backwards.

14 min read

Business

지옥고: Korea Has One Word for Its Worst Housing, and English Doesn't

반지하, 옥탑방, 고시원 — the semi-basement, the rooftop room and the tiny rented cell. English writes three separate articles about them. Korean has a single word that puns on the word for hell, and a body of reporting that gets the history right.

13 min read

Business

Republic of Apartments: Why Koreans Live in Identical Towers — On Purpose

Two-thirds of Korean homes are apartments, and they look near-identical for a reason. The sameness isn't a failure of imagination — it's what turns an apartment into a liquid, tradable asset. A guide to the 아파트 공화국: the 84㎡ flat everyone wants, the chaebol brands that signal your class, and how a home became a savings account.

11 min read

Business

The Interest-Free Loan That Built Korea Is Coming Due: Jeonse, Explained

For decades, millions of Koreans rented with no monthly payment at all — you hand the landlord a lump sum worth most of the apartment, live rent-free, and get it all back in two years. In April 2026, for the first time, monthly rent overtook jeonse inside Seoul's apartments. A guide to how the world's strangest lease worked, why it's dying, and how not to lose your deposit.

12 min read

Business

POSCO: How Korea Forged Itself in Steel

Every other giant in Korea's rise was a family dynasty. POSCO wasn't. It was a government-willed steel mill, built on an empty Pohang beach with settlement money from Japan, by a general who told his workers that if they failed they should all walk into the sea. This is the story of the chaebol that isn't a chaebol — and its late-life gamble to forge Korea's battery age.

12 min read

Business

The House of LG: Korea's Gentleman Chaebol

How a Korean cosmetics shop and a radio factory grew into a battery-and-display empire — and why the Koo family's obsession with 'harmony,' single heirs, and quiet exits made LG the least dramatic dynasty in Korea's most dramatic business tradition.

11 min read

Business

The House of SK: The Textile Mill That Became the AI Era's Kingmaker

SK started with 15 looms in a bombed-out Korea. Seventy years later, a company few Westerners can name makes the memory chips that make Nvidia's AI possible — and, for one day in 2026, it was worth more than Samsung. This is how a textile house became the quiet kingmaker of the artificial-intelligence boom.

11 min read

Business

The House of Hyundai: The Family That Built Korea

If the Lees of Samsung are Korea's uncrowned royalty, the Chungs of Hyundai are the dynasty that showed up in work boots. Founder Chung Ju-yung was a runaway farm boy who took money from his father's cow — and whose companies then poured the country's expressways, welded its ships, and built its first car. This is the story of Korea's self-made empire, the feud that shattered it, and why there are so many Hyundais.

13 min read

Business

The House of Samsung: Korea's Uncrowned Royal Family

South Korea abolished its monarchy over a century ago — then grew a new royal house inside a company. Across three generations the Lee family has controlled roughly a fifth of the national economy from a sliver of direct ownership, moved between prison cells and presidential pardons like a dynasty between exile and restoration, and paid the largest inheritance-tax bill in the country's history. This is how a Daegu grocer's line became the household nobody elected but everybody lives inside.

13 min read

Business

The Chaebol, Explained: The Families That Run Korea

Wake up in Seoul and you can spend the whole day inside a handful of family empires without noticing — your phone, your car, your apartment, the hospital you'd rush to. Here's what a chaebol really is, the 1961 shotgun marriage between a general and a dozen tycoons that built them, and the double edge of a country a few bloodlines run: the miracle, the gapjil, and 'too big to jail.'

12 min read

Business

Why Korea Makes the World's Memory Chips

Almost every phone, laptop, and AI data center on earth runs on memory chips — and roughly two-thirds of them come from two Korean companies you already know. Here's how a country the size of Indiana got a chokehold on the stuff that makes the AI boom possible, told the Korean way: a state, a chaebol, and a bet-the-company gamble that started in 1983.

11 min read

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