South Korean government ministry overseeing small and medium-sized enterprises, startups, and traditional market policy.
South Korea's startup ministry will issue a notice this month to select six more Startup Cities, joining the current four. A founder at the Daejeon roundtable said regional funds have little to invest, so the notice's terms will show whether designation brings capital.
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About 675,000 Korean SMEs led by executives aged 60 or older have no successor, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups estimates. Tax relief mostly covers handovers to children, so inside buyers must fund stakes worth tens of billions of won largely alone.
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Of the 591 products South Korea's SME ministry certified as innovative from 2020 through last year, 186, or 31.5%, have never had a public purchase. On the ministry's own figures, the label produces first orders more reliably than it produces repeat public customers.
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Korea Exchange paused delisting procedures for eight small caps after a court granted injunctions to two of them over its market-cap rule. Some flagged shares hit their daily upper limit on the news, a bet that regulators will soften a test the exchange still applies.
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Korea's SME ministry broke ground on a 217.3 billion won lab hub in Songdo built to house 60 bio startups by 2028. Private money is 8.1 billion won of that, so the state is building the cluster before investors have shown they will follow the tenants in.
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Lee So-young, Korea's SME minister, wants the digital Onnuri voucher discount set above the 5% her ministry proposed as a cut from today's 7%. The draft budget assumes 5%, so any extra point needs money the National Assembly would have to add in its review.
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Korea will cut the Onnuri voucher's upfront discount to 5% and pay up to 5% more at traditional markets, on issuance trimmed to 4.6 trillion won. With 65% of redemptions already at markets, much of the rebate pays for spending the program already had.
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Lee So-young's nomination begins the work of putting a confirmed minister back over Korea's SME and startups brief, whose venture-capital and overseas-expansion tasks have so far been stated without a number attached.
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Lee So-young told merchants in Suwon that more voucher benefit should reach traditional markets, and that a plan is coming within days. Her ministry had weighed a 900 billion won cut to 2027 issuance.
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Merchants at Cheongnyangni and Guri describe a thin Chuseok, and the only counted series behind their accounts is the number of stalls still occupied inside Korea's traditional markets. It has been falling for four years.
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Telemedicine gets institutionalised in December, and widening home drug delivery past a short list of patient categories will take a separate legal revision that the pharmacists' association is mobilising to stop.
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Korea's Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission analysed 2,184 startup complaints filed over twelve months and found offers of paid access among the most common, with monthly volumes running 36.5% above the earlier pace.
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A wholly state-funded subsidiary of Korea Venture Investment Corp will seed 100 designated firms a year across ten fields, which puts the government on both sides of the trade, as first investor and as anchor customer.
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Korea Venture Investment can now stand up a Variable Capital Company and raise sub-funds in Singapore, which means the state programme will diligence GPs as an MAS-licensed local rather than as a visiting Seoul allocator.
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Records for about 5,000 applicants were encrypted and still exposed, because the key travelled in the API response. The warning about that API arrived a month early.
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Korea's technology guarantee agency now sources and brokers small-company M&A as well as backing it. The bank's cash in the 14.3 billion won iM deal works out at roughly 200 million won.
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AI-led ICT and bio took about 38 percent of Korea's record 8.87 trillion won half. Unitree closed its Shanghai debut up 460 percent, at an implied 1,200 times earnings.
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The National Police Agency is reassigning 79 officers into overseas-leak units and doubling the dedicated teams in Seoul and southern Gyeonggi. Insiders were the source in 60 of 68 cases through July.
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