South Korean mobile carrier SK Telecom said Thursday that it will introduce an ultra-fast Long Term Evolution network that is around nine times faster than conventional LTE speeds in the country next month.The new network service, dubbed the “4.5G network,” will become available on the newly-launched Samsung Galaxy S8 from next month via a software upgrade, SKT said. Choi Seung-won (center), senior vice president of SKT’s infrastructure strategy division, poses during a press event to mark the c

Technology April 20, 2017

South Korea’s Netmarble Games, which is looking to raise as much as 2.66 trillion won ($2.4 billion) in an initial public offering, plans to leverage the newly generated funds to invest 5 trillion won toward strategic mergers and acquisitions in the future.The Korean mobile game giant plans to pursue larger-scale M&As to boost its business portfolio in the future with the new capital generated by the IPO, according to Netmarble Games CEO Kwon Young-sig on Tuesday.Netmarble Games CEO Kwon Young-s

Technology April 18, 2017

NOVARTIS UNDER FIRE IN KOREA — South Korean civic groups representing local patients with leukemia and gastrointestinal stromal tumors hold a rally criticizing Novartis for allegedly inflicting damage to patients in a protest held in front of the Novartis Korea headquarters in Seoul, Monday. Korea’s Health Ministry is slated to suspend insurance coverage for 18 drugs sold by Novartis here as punishment for the Swiss drugmaker which was found to have provided bribes worth 2.6 billion won ($2.28 m

Industry April 18, 2017

South Korea’s Hanmi Pharmaceutical was found to have belatedly reported the occurrence of a fatal side effect in a patient during the clinical trials of its next-generation lung cancer drug olmutinib, sold under the trade name Olita Tab.The Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea announced Monday that the Korean drugmaker had broken two medical laws regarding the monitoring and reporting of its clinical trials.　The board had opened an investigation after some lawmakers charged Hanmi of intentiona

Industry April 17, 2017

SK C&C, the internet technology solutions unit of South Korea’s SK Group, is planning to commercialize its Korean-language artificial intelligence computing platform Aibril, based on IBM’s AI-powered cognitive computing system Watson, by as early as June.　The SK company said Monday that it is expecting to officially introduce Aibril to the market sometime in late June or early July, though it has yet to set an exact launch date.　(Yonhap)Developed by SK C&C in partnership with IBM, Aibril is desi

Technology April 17, 2017

South Korean internet giant Naver officially jumped into the fast-growing cloud platform service business Monday with the opening of a new cloud platform website.Naver Business Platform, the IT infrastructure technology arm of Naver, opened www.ncloud.com, offering cloud computing infrastructure for some 30 service categories including data computing, security management and network technologies.The firm said it plans to add four or five new service categories each month, based on its in-house t

Technology April 17, 2017

Eli Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim launched Basaglar, a biosimilar referencing Sanofi’s blockbuster insulin drug Lantus, in South Korea on Thursday, intent on challenging the original drug’s dominance in the domestic market for diabetes treatments.Basaglar KwikPen, designed as a pen-shaped self-injection device, is a long-acting basal insulin for the treatment of adults and children with type 1 diabetes mellitus and adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus.The drug secured approval from Korea’s Mini

Industry April 14, 2017

Kakao, the operator of South Korea’s dominant mobile messenger KakaoTalk, is set to host a machine learning training camp on Jeju Island in July as part of efforts to ramp up Korea’s artificial intelligence technology development.Kakao said Friday it will hold the “Machine Learning Camp Jeju 2017” from July 3-18 together with the Korean users of TensorFlow, Google’s open source machine learning system.  (Kakao Corp.)The plans come as the Korean mobile giant has set artificial intelligence as a k

Technology April 14, 2017

Small consumer goods and media content companies in South Korea are seeking to diversify their global targets, and global e-commerce platform Amazon has been fast to pick up on the trend, offering promotions to attract such businesses.Both sides are enjoying a boost, as the companies gain easier entry into unchartered markets while the online market giant secures stable sources of sales.As China has been pursuing economic retaliation to protest Seoul’s decision to deploy an American missile defe

Technology April 13, 2017

The chief of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, the strategic venture arm of the US health care giant leading the firm’s open innovation push, is to hold preliminary meetings with a number of South Korean biotech and medical tech firms this week.Robert Urban, the global head of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, told The Korea Herald Tuesday that his team would discuss Korea’s health care ecosystem and J&J’s innovation platform with four to five local biopharmaceutical companies and investor groups over t

Industry April 11, 2017

Destiny, or fate, was what politics was for Moon Jae-in, the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party of Korea. Now standing as the liberal presidential flag-bearer for the second time in his life, Moon vows to finish the reforms started by his dearest friend, ally and supporter, and the reason he entered politics: late liberal President Roh Moo-hyun. It was just in 2012 that Moon, a former human rights lawyer, began his career as a legislator. Since then, he has had a quick rise to be whe

National April 10, 2017

Samsung Electronics Co. could be required to pay additional corporate taxes due to an accounting error, industry sources here said Monday.The total that the tech giant may be ordered to pay has not been announced but sources said it could be a sizable sum. (Yonhap)National Tax Service (NTS) had been conducting its regular audit on the world‘s leading smartphone and memory chipmaker and found differences in the way Samsung viewed its corporate expenses, which are exempt from taxation. Industry in

Technology April 10, 2017