Foreign companies operating in South Korea accounted for nearly 14 percent of the country‘s overall corporate tax income in 2015, the national tax agency said Sunday.

Multinational firms, reaching only 1.5 percent of the country’s 673,374 companies at the end of 2015, earned a combined 664 trillion won ($555 billion) and paid a total of 5.3 trillion won in corporate tax that year, data from the National Tax Service showed. 

Their earnings accounted for almost 15 percent of the nation‘s overall corporate earnings worth 4,468 trillion won and their corporate taxes marked 13.6 percent of total corporate taxes valued at 39 trillion won in the same year, the data said.

“Foreign firms operating here are relatively bigger than domestic ones in terms of size. The size of their (individual) income and taxes often exceeds that of local companies,” an NTS official said.

Seven out of 10 foreign firms in South Korea are from the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and China, and they are mainly involved in the services, wholesale and retail businesses, according to NTS data.

Foreign companies here include multinational firms directly controlled by their parents in their home countries and foreign-invested firms. (Yonhap)