Foreigners swiped less with their credit cards during their stays in South Korea in the April-June period as the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak led to a fall in the number of visitors to the country, data showed Friday.
  

Foreigners' card spending in the country totaled $2.73 billion in the second quarter, slipping 1 percent from $2.76 billion three months earlier, according to the data by the Bank of Korea. From a year earlier, it also dipped 6.4 percent.
  

The local retail and tourism sector faltered when the outbreak, the largest outside Saudi Arabia, hit the country in late May, claiming 36 lives here.
  

The number of foreigners who entered the country in June reached 750,000, plunging 43.7 percent from May, according to separate data by the Korea Culture and Tourism Institute.
  

The central bank explained that while the number of overseas visitors sharply fell in June, a bigger-than-usual inflow of visitors in April helped limit a fall in overall card spending during the second quarter.
  

The data, meanwhile, showed that overseas card spending by South Koreans totaled a record $3.32 billion during the three-month period, up 3.3 percent from the first quarter.
  

While the number of outbound visitors fell 5.3 percent on-quarter, the amount each person spent increased, the central bank explained. (Yonhap)