Korean large firms' combined operating profit drops 1.7% in H1 without SK hynix: data

Major Korean companies, excluding chip giant SK hynix, saw their operating profit decline 1.7 percent in the first half of the year from a year earlier amid lingering economic uncertainties, industry data showed Sunday. According to the data from corporate tracker CEO Score, 342 of the country's top 500 companies by sales that released their half-yearly reports posted a combined 1,655.3 trillion won in sales for the January-June period, up 5.5 percent from a year earlier. Their aggregated operating profit rose 5.9 percent on-year to 118.5 trillion won. However, when excluding SK hynix, which reported the largest operating profit of 16.7 trillion won for the period, their combined operating income fell 1.7 percent from a year earlier. SK hynix's operating profit nearly doubled from 8.4 trillion won a year ago, driven by rising demand for high bandwidth memory (HBM) amid a boom for artificial intelligence (AI) computing. Tech giant Samsung Electronics placed second with an operating profit of 11.4 trillion won for the first half, down 33.4 percent from a year earlier. Hyundai Motor logged 7.Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times