Restrictive Internet platform in Korea

First published in The Korea Herald. The Korean government has finally announced its plans to start removing the troublesome ActiveX software from public websites later this month in order to create a more user-friendly Internet environment. For long, this tech-savvy country has been stuck in a time warp with its slavish dependence on Internet Explorer. ActiveX controls were one of the many troublesome regulations that President Park Geun-hye vowed to remove in her signature deregulation initiative, and it is good to notice that the government is moving fast. It is a software framework that defines reusable software components in programming language and has become an integral part of the country’s Internet landscape. Because it is a nonstandard software, it sometimes has trouble interacting...

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Korea's growing M&A activity

First published in The Korea Herald. Mergers and acquisitions in Korea scaled new heights last year as companies undertook massive restructuring and big deals were struck. According to the Global M&A Market Review published recently by Bloomberg, the M&A market nearly doubled to $79.7 billion in 2014 from the previous year. This is also four times more than the $20.4 billion recorded in 2011. It is not very difficult to guess the reasons for the M&A boom. For starters, many companies were sitting on massive cash piles, while the slowdown in the economy and their weak earnings forced businesses to restructure and discard their poorly performing units. A string of megadeals including the merger between Daum Communications Corp. and Kakao Corp. and the merger between Samsung SDI...

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Korea-India economic ties slow to take off

First published in The Korea Herald. It has now been five years since the India-Korea Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement ― a de facto free trade agreement ― went into effect, but the trade statistics do not present a very rosy picture. It was widely anticipated that the CEPA, which came into effect in January 2010, would lead to more bilateral trade and investments. South Korea has abolished tariffs on 93 percent of Indian imports, and India has done the same on 75 percent of Korean imports. Besides, the agreement sought to increase the interactive trade account, as it includes investment in various sectors like goods, services and even intellectual property. However, according to the latest statistics released by the Korea International Trade Association, while bilateral trade...

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Curious case of Uber in Korea

First published in The Korea Herald. Over the past couple of years, the sharing economy ― a system built around the sharing of human and physical resources ― has caught the world by storm. While the practice of sharing goods has always been common between closed groups ― friends, family and neighbors ― now the concept has evolved into a profitable business model. It has been helped largely by the strides in information technology that led to the worldwide boom in Internet penetration and smartphone use. The sharing economy has many advantages. It can reduce costs for available goods, services and time. You can use a product or service only when necessary, and don’t have to deal with the normal headaches. On the other hand, an owner can unlock the potential value of an item, such as a room,...

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