Six out of 10 Korean companies expect their business to worsen due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, a survey released by the Korea Economic Research Institute showed.

The survey, conducted by Mono Research on the top 1,000 companies by revenue, showed that 61.8 percent of them said the outbreak will hamper their overall revenue and exports. Among those with production facilities in China, 83.9 percent said they will be hurt by the virus.

A prolonged pandemic will hurt the auto industry the most with a 13.9 percent drop in revenue, followed by the auto parts (-12.8 percent), petroleum products (-12.4 percent), and machineries (-11.0 percent), the survey said.

If the crisis subsides in the shorter-term, the anticipated drop in revenue was relatively more pronounced among the mobile communications devices (-8.4 percent), followed by cars (-7.3 percent), petroleum products (-0.6 percent) and machineries (-5.9 percent).

(khnews@heraldcorp.com)