Published at 01:58 (GMT) 02 Apr
Yonhap: South Korea's monthly current account surplus narrowed for a third consecutive month in February but extended its surplus streak to 36 months in a row, data showed Thursday. The current account surplus hit US$6.44 bn in February, inching down from a revised $6.58 bn a month earlier, according to the preliminary data by the Bank of Korea. The balance of goods reached $7.32 bn in February, gaining from a revised $6.69 bn surplus in the previous month. The service account, which includes outlays by South Koreans on overseas trips, narrowed its deficit to $2.06 bn from $2.38 bn in January. The primary income account, which tracks wages of foreign workers and dividend payments overseas, halved to $1.4 bn from $2.9 bn as dividend income declined. Investment income on equity dropped to $862.9 mn from $2.32 bn a month earlier when the figure hit a record monthly high on a spike in dividend income at IT firms that directly invest overseas.
Also in the newswires, more than a hundred executives at Samsung Electronics Co., South Korea's No. 1 tech giant, left their posts between late last year and the first quarter of 2015, data showed Thursday, in what seems to be an aftereffect of the lackluster performance in 2014 smartphone sales. The number of unregistered executives at the world's top smartphone and memory chipmaker had stood at 1,219 in the quarter ending in September 2014, according to the company's half-yearly report filed with the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), the country's financial regulator. The figure, however, fell by 177 to 1,042 as of the end of last month, of which 25 percent, representing 44 C-suite members, were from the firms' mainstay mobile division, Samsung's latest business report submitted to the FSS showed. The number of executives who resigned over the cited period is 70 percent higher compared with a year earlier. In the fourth quarter of 2013, a total of 104 executives vacated their posts (Yonhap).
On FX, USD/KRW dropped below 1100.00, hitting nearly 1-m lows after in the overnight move, USD/KRW 1M NDF prices also dropped to below 1100.00 lvls. Spot hit a low of 1098.00 targeting couple of small sports at 1097.70/1094.50 ahead of stronger base at 1093.80. KOSPI trading in black, up 0.4% around 2035.00 lvls. BB
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