A gasoline-powered BMW 3-Series, which wasn’t included in the latest recall list, caught fire in Yongin, Gyeonggi on Monday. [YONHAP]BMW cars are still bursting into flames in Korea as a huge recall here continues after a spate of vehicle fires over the summer crippled the German automaker.
A BMW X5 30d SUV caught fire on Tuesday evening in Seoul while it was being driven. The 2007 version of the model is powered by diesel and is not included in the recall list. The fire did not cause any injuries.
Just a day earlier, a gasoline-powered 3-Series model that wasn’t included in the latest recall list caught fire in Yongin, Gyeonggi.
The driver pulled over after realizing that the steering wheel was not operating properly. The engine quickly caught fire once the car had stopped, the driver told a local fire station. No injuries were reported.
“We are currently looking into the case to figure out the reason behind the fire,” a spokesperson for BMW Korea said Tuesday. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
Anchor: New jobs figures released Wednesday show a bleak situation. Unemployment reached its highest point last month since the Asian financial crisis nearly 20 years ago.
Our Park Jong-hong has this report.
Report: The latest figures show South Korea’s jobless rate rose slightly in August to four percent due to a fall in employment in the retail and manufacturing sectors.
Young adults aged 15 to 29 who were out of a job last month stood at ten percent, up six-tenths of a percentage point from the previous year and the highest since 1999.
The number of employed went up by a mere three-thousand compared to August last year to 26-point-nine million.
This increase in jobs last month is the smallest since January 2010, when ten-thousand jobs were cut.
For the second month in a row, the number of newly added jobs has stayed below ten-thousand per month.
An official at Statistics Korea, which compiled the report, said one main reason behind the dismal figures is the struggling business at automakers and shipbuilders which is spilling over to related sectors like retail. [KBS World Radio]
If you own a BMW you better get it checked out soon:
Two more diesel vehicles, a 730Ld model, left, and a 320d, right, caught fire on Korean highways on Thursday. The former is not included on a recall list announced by BMW Korea last month. [YONHAP]Two more BMW diesel cars caught fire Thursday morning, less than an hour apart, as Korea’s Transport Ministry mulls banning the fire-prone BMW vehicles from Korean roads.
This makes 36 cases of BMWs bursting into flames in Korea this year, eight in the last nine days.
As some of the vehicles that caught fire in recent weeks are not even included in BMW’s official recall list, industry analysts are raising new doubts about the company’s description of the cause of the fires.
On Thursday, a 730Ld model caught fire on the Namhae Expressway in South Gyeongsang.
The fire was extinguished within 15 minutes, according to the local fire station. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more at the link, but BMW is saying the fires are being caused by an exhaust gas recirculation issue.
It looks like reality has set in for the Moon administration’s attempt to raise the minimum wage even further in South Korea:
Moon Jae-in
President Moon Jae-in admitted Monday he won’t fulfill his campaign pledge to raise the minimum wage to 10,000 won ($8.86) by 2020, after anguished protests about rising labor costs from small business owners and concerns voiced by at least one top member of his administration.
“As a result of the decision by the Minimum Wage Commission, it became difficult to achieve the target of raising the minimum wage to 10,000 won by 2020,” Moon said during a meeting with his senior secretaries at the Blue House on Monday. “I offer my apologies for being unable to keep my pledge.”
The president added that he respects the decision by the commission to keep next year’s minimum wage hike lower than expected and said the government will do its best to realize a 10,000 won minimum wage as early as possible.
Moon’s five-year term ends in May 2022. Moon expressed his appreciation to the commission for raising next year’s minimum wage by more than 10 percent. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
I think these mom and pop stores have a valid complaint because big businesses can respond to the wage increase by cutting jobs or hours and then automating where necessary. Mom and pop stores may not have the capital available to automate like a bigger business:
Owners of mom-and-pop stores on Friday called on the government to freeze the minimum wage in 2019, claiming rising labor costs will seriously impact their profitability.
If the government moves to raise the minimum hourly wage from the current 7,530 won, the Korea Federation of Micro Enterprise (KFME) won’t accept it, a KFME official said.
The Minimum Wage Commission is required to set the guidelines for next year’s minimum wage level by Saturday. Representatives for labor are demanding a 43 percent increase in the wage to 10,790 won, but small businesses have made it clear that such a step is unacceptable.
Mom-and-pop stores and other modestly sized firms account for 86 percent of the country’s enterprises and hire 36 percent of its total workforce, according to Statistics Korea.
The country’s minimum wage shot up this year, and the Moon Jae-in government is pushing to raise the hourly base to 10,000 won within three years to achieve “income-led growth.”
But local businesses are lukewarm to the idea. There has been a move to let go of workers due to rising costs, with people in their 20s and 30s facing greater difficulties landing jobs. [Yonhap]
It is going to be interesting to see how much market the new Homeplus Special warehouse store is going to be able to capture in South Korea:
Inside of Home plus Special in Mokdong, southwestern Seoul / Courtesy of Home plus
The second basement of Home plus’ Mokdong branch in southwestern Seoul looked totally different, Wednesday, as the discount store’s space selling groceries has been converted into a warehouse store with capacious shelves piled with boxes.
“As I said in March at a press conference about the business strategy of Home plus, we will unveil Home plus Special today to fulfill our promise to make a store satisfying our customers,” Home plus CEO Lim Il-soon said at a press conference, a day before the opening of Seoul’s first Home plus Special. “We opened Home plus Special stores in Daegu and Busan last month, and they have been well-received by consumers.”
Defining Mokdong as the battlefield of retailers in Korea, she predicted fierce competition with Yangpyung Costco Warehouse and Lotte Vic Market’s Yeongdeungpo branch, which are 1.6 kilometers and 2.7 kilometers from Home plus Special, respectively.
Home plus, however, is confident the new warehouse store will be a success. [Korea Times]
The patent war between the two biggest smartphone rivals has finally ended.
Samsung Electronics and Apple have settled a seven-year legal dispute over each other’s design patents. Neither disclosed the amount of the settlement.
The two giants informed the district court in San Jose, California, “they have agreed to drop and settle their remaining claims and counterclaims in this matter,” according to an order signed by Judge Lucy Koh of the Northern District of California. The settlement means all suits will be dismissed and no further case will be filed on the same claim.
“We can only say that we have settled with Apple and cannot offer any comment,” said a Samsung spokesman.
The dramatic turn of the lengthy legal battle came a month after retrial jurors in the Northern District of California handed Apple $538.6 million in damages for Samsung violating design and utility (technical) patents that included the infamous “rounded corner” patent. Samsung at the time vowed to consider its options including another appeal. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
The Cho sisters have both been officially fired by their father from Korean Air:
Emily Cho
Add Hanjin Group’s Korean Air Lines Co. to the country’s family-run conglomerates that are seeing the founding clan’s representation diluted.
This time, Hanjin Chairman Cho Yang-ho pushed out his youngest daughter after allegations she threw water in the face of an advertising agency worker during a business meeting. For good measure, he also fired his eldest daughter who four years ago spent five months in jail after the so-called nut rage incident. The executive had forced a plane to return to the gate at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York because of the way she’d been served her macadamia nuts.
Cho Yang-ho, also chairman of Korean Air, said in an email Sunday he will promote professional business managers to replace the airline’s Senior Vice President Emily Cho, his youngest daughter, and Heather Cho, president of the Kal Hotel Network. The chairman announced the changes days after South Korean police had searched Korean Air headquarters following reports of the “water rage” incident. [Bloomberg]
You can read more at the link, but I wonder how long this will last before they are brought back in some capacity into the family business?
Very rarely have I seen President Moon be criticized in the media, but it looks like he is finally facing some heat for his domestic job policies:
South Korea has been trapped in a paradox of employment.
Domestically, the more effort the government makes, the more difficult it is for young people to find decent jobs.
In other words, President Moon Jae-in’s job policies are limiting the creation of new, quality jobs in the private sector.
Last year, Moon implemented a supplementary budget of 11.2 trillion won ($10.5 billion) to create jobs and formulated another extra budget plan of 3.9 trillion won early this month. However, the job market situation has taken a turn for the worse.
The jobless rate reached 4.5 percent in March, the highest level in 17 years. The number of jobs created came to 112,000 from the same month a year ago, sharply down from January’s 334,000.
Internationally, Korea is isolated in its job market recovery.
Many big economies, including the U.S. and Japan, are showing handsome figures in employment, while Korea’s labor market has stayed in the doldrums.
The jobless rate for the U.S. stood at 4.1 percent in March, the lowest level in 17 years. Japan’s unemployment rate was at 2.5 percent in the same month, similar to 2.4 percent in February, the lowest in nearly 25 years.
The employment fiasco for Asia’s fourth-largest economy is the outcome of a toxic mixture of three forces ― Moon’s contradictory policies, market uncertainties and technology.
First, a surge in the unemployment rate is paradoxically associated with Moon’s job policies.
The Moon administration has been trying to take the initiative in job creation rather than encouraging the private sector to hire new employees.
Moon has focused on creating jobs in the public sector by hiring more civil servants and turning irregular workers into regular ones. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but I never did see how adding a bunch of government jobs without a justification for them would help the economy?
This seems to be the wave of the future, cashless stores:
Starbucks Coffee Korea, the local unit of the U.S. coffee giant, said Thursday it will begin a test run of cashless stores at three outlets next month amid rising use of credit card and mobile payment systems.
The stores at the country’s major office districts — Gangnam and Guro in Seoul, and Pangyo, just south of the capital — have been tapped to start testing the new system April 23, according to the company.
When launched, it will mark the second trial for the global coffee giant, following its first cashless store under test run in Seattle, the United States, it said.
Paying with cash has been constantly declining at Starbucks stores in South Korea, from 31 percent of the total in 2010 to 15 percent in 2013 and 7 percent last year, the company said. [Korea Times]
