US tech giant Google has recently discontinued offering real-time popular searches in Korea, a feature long banned by its Korean rivals such as Naver and Daum due to the possibility of manipulating public opinion. “We have decided to remove the feature from Google Search in Korea. The feature is no longer available here,” Google Korea said in a statement Wednesday. No further elaboration on the reason and timing of the suspension was given. Naver and Daum suspended their popular sear

Technology July 17, 2024

SK Telecom, South Korea's largest wireless carrier by membership, said Tuesday that it has signed a contract to invest $200 million in Smart Global Holdings, a US company specializing in data center integration solutions. Under the terms of the agreement, SKT will acquire 200,000 preferred shares and secure about 10 percent ownership through conversion to common stock. This marks the telecom giant’s largest investment in the artificial intelligence sector. With this investment, the am

Technology July 16, 2024

Amid Samsung Electronics’ leadership as a foldable phone pioneer, its Chinese rivals appear to be racing to shrink the size of their new phones. Last week in Paris, Samsung unveiled its new foldable phones the Galaxy Z Fold6 and Flip6, touting them as the slimmer and lighter phones to be powered by its new artificial intelligence features, called Galaxy AI. Just a few days after Samsung's highly-publicized Unpacked event, China’s Honor launched its version Friday, saying the new

Technology July 15, 2024

Samsung Electronics’ latest foldable phones -- the Galaxy Z Flip6 and Z Fold6 -- were unveiled at the summer edition of the Galaxy Unpacked 2024 event in Paris on Wednesday, surprising the audience with slimmer and lighter designs. The Korea Herald had a chance to try out the new foldable lineup the day after the unveiling event in Korea. The tech giant’s first artificial intelligence-powered foldable phones are easy to hold and fun to play with, but the more you use them, the more t

Technology July 11, 2024

Samsung Electronics unveiled its new slimmer and lighter foldable phones -- the Galaxy Z Flip6 and Z Fold6 -- in Paris on Wednesday, betting big on the Olympics fever brewing in the French capital. As the venue for the biggest product launch in the latter half of this year, the Korean tech giant chose the iconic Louvre Museum, inviting some 1,000 journalists and industry people from around the globe. “Samsung Electronics has been leading the foldable market through continuous innovation si

Technology July 10, 2024

JobKorea, a job search platform, said Monday it has launched a separate job search app specifically for foreign national residents, Klik, an acronym for "kick-start life in Korea." This service is intended for residents of foreign nationality in South Korea to find jobs and for domestic companies to recruit foreign national employees, according to the platform. The app can be translated into 28 languages, including English, French, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian

Industry July 8, 2024

LG Electronics said Friday it expected its second-quarter earnings to climb more than 60 percent from a year earlier on robust sales of its main home appliance products and balanced qualitative growth of its business-to-business sector. LG estimated that its operating profit for the April-June period came in at 1.19 trillion won ($863.2 million), up 61.2 percent from a year ago, according to the company’s earnings guidance. The home appliance maker’s earnings guidance for the April-J

Technology July 5, 2024

Samsung Electronics predicted Friday that its operating profit in the April-June period would rebound to exceed 10 trillion won ($7.3 billion), driven by a recovery in demand for memory chips and rising prices on the back of the expansion of the artificial intelligence market. Samsung's second-quarter operating profit is estimated to hit 10.4 trillion won, up 1,452.2 percent from a year ago, according to the company’s earnings guidance. The figure far exceeded the 8.23 trillion won consens

Technology July 5, 2024

Negotiations over Naver’s sale of a stake in its joint venture with Japan’s SoftBank are expected to be prolonged, with no immediate breakthrough in sight. Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon on Tuesday said the Korean portal giant had no immediate intention to sell its stake in LY Corp., the operator of Japan’s popular messenger Line. Naver and SoftBank each own 50 percent of A Holdings, which controls almost 65 percent of shares in LY Corp. Asked about the possible change in its ownershi

Industry July 4, 2024

Top executives of Naver and Nvidia met in the US last week and their key agenda was securing “sovereign AI.” Sovereign AI refers to a nation’s capabilities to autonomously develop and produce artificial intelligence models using its own infrastructure, data, workforce and business network. Tech firms have put greater value on the concept as it allows AI models to be more advanced by incorporating cultures, languages and values specific to each region. “Naver and Nvidia wi

Technology July 3, 2024

Unionized workers of Samsung Electronics have said they will stage a three-day walkout beginning July 8, as their negotiations with management over wages and working conditions have so far failed. The National Samsung Electronics Union, the largest among multiple Samsung Electronics unions with some 28,400 workers, or 22 percent of the total workforce, announced the decision on Monday evening livestreaming on YouTube. “Any further peaceful strike is meaningless,” said Son Woo-mok, pr

Industry July 2, 2024

SK On, the battery unit of South Korean chip-to-construction conglomerate SK Group, said Monday it will freeze the annual pay of all executive-level officials until it turns to profit, declaring emergency management amid its sluggish performance. The company decided to drastically revamp all working processes, including resource distribution, to improve operational efficiency in response to the changing industry environment as global electric vehicle markets are in a stagnation phase, known as t

Industry July 1, 2024

SK Group said Sunday that it will secure 80 trillion won ($57.9 billion) by 2026 to accelerate its push for two growth drivers: chips and artificial intelligence. SK hynix, its chipmaking unit, alone plans to invest 103 trillion won by 2028, with 80 percent of the new funding focusing on AI chips, including high-bandwidth memory, a burgeoning area where the chip giant has secured an earlier edge. Telecom carrier SK Telecom and internet service provider SK Broadband will also invest a combined 3.

Industry June 30, 2024

LG Innotek said Thursday that it has met nearly 61 percent of its renewable energy transition goals just a year since it joined the RE100 corporate initiative in July 2022. According to its sustainability report, it converted 60.9 percent of its energy consumption to renewable energy last year, a significant increase from 22.1 percent in 2022. LG Innotek explained that this resulted in about 267,000 tons of reduction in carbon emissions, equivalent to that of around 40 million 30-year-old pine t

Industry June 30, 2024

South Korean-owned sportswear brand Fila Holdings on Thursday released its latest annual sustainability report, “Your Fila Impact -- Fila Integrated Report 2023,” demonstrating its commitment to sustainability management. This is the fifth publication of its kind since Fila established its “Your Fila Impact 2025” sustainability goal in 2019. Last year, the company adopted its sustainability theme: "Change the game: From deuce to victory." In the environmental

Industry June 27, 2024