RaymondsIndex

On the evening of 25 August 2026, a Korean department store operator disclosed that the sale of its controlling stake had been terminated. The buyer had not paid ₩7bn of an ₩8bn instalment. The next morning the shares opened 26% lower, at ₩3,165 — against the ₩8,000 a share the contract had specified six weeks earlier. The arithmetic of the deal is worth laying out, because it is unusually legible. On 15 July, the chairman and six others agreed to transfer 2,795,743 shares, 25.82% of the company, for ₩22,365,944,000. The structure had three parts: an up-front portion, a second instalment of ₩8bn, and a closing payment of ₩11,965,944,000 due 8 September. Subtract the second instalment and the closing payment from the total and the up-front portion works out to ₩2.4bn. On 21 August — 37 days into the contract — the buyer's position was reassigned to a different party and the payment calendar was rewritten. Four days after that, the deal was dead. What reinvestment intensity is act...

On 25 August 2026, Gabia — a KOSDAQ-listed hosting and cloud company — disclosed that Align Partners Capital Management and one other applicant had filed for an injunction at the Anyang branch of the Suwon District Court. The case number is 2026카합10135. The relief sought is unusually concrete: thirty days of access to the company's accounting books and records at its head office, starting three business days after the ruling is served; permission to bring lawyers and certified public accountants along; and ₩5 million for every day the company fails to comply. The application was filed on 10 August. Per the company's own disclosure, it was served on 25 August. Gabia says it will respond through legal procedure. What makes this worth a Wednesday column is not the dispute. It is what the dispute reveals about where public data ends. The request moved. Six months earlier, in February, the same fund had asked for something far smaller. It submitted a recommendatory shareholder ...

On 24 August, a KOSDAQ-listed rare-earth magnet company called JS Link filed a routine-looking disclosure. It will repurchase ₩5.05bn of face value on its 14th private convertible bond — half of a ₩10.1bn issue — by exercising the issuer's own call option. Settlement is 1 September, off-market. The actual outlay, principal plus interest, is ₩5,331,992,000, and the filing states the source of funds in three characters: internal cash . The notes were issued on 1 August 2025. They mature on 1 August 2028. The company is buying them back at month thirteen of a thirty-six-month instrument. Both of the obvious readings are defensible. One says this is deleveraging: retiring conversion rights removes dilution pressure, and Korean market coverage earlier this year flagged the potential overhang from this issuer's convertibles as something to watch. The other says a company with eight consecutive years of operating losses — ₩19.3bn of revenue against ₩12.3bn of operating loss in 2025...

On 19 August, a small KOSDAQ manufacturer disclosed that its largest-shareholder block had changed hands. The filing was unusually bare. Purpose of acquisition: not applicable. Source of funds: not applicable. Plans to appoint or remove officers: not applicable. Reason for change: commencement of inheritance following the death of the largest shareholder. DUOBACK (KOSDAQ 073190), an ergonomic-chair maker founded in 1987, had 44.10% of its shares held by its chief executive and five related parties — 5,278,486 shares, of which 4,351,102 (36.36%) stood in the chief executive's own name. He died on 17 August; two days later the company filed the change; the next morning trading was suspended pending a delisting eligibility review. Read that sequence carefully. The causal chain is not the obvious one. What actually halted the stock The company had lost money at the operating line every year since 2021 — roughly ₩3.2bn, ₩4.2bn, ₩3.9bn, ₩3.4bn and ₩3.0bn across FY2021–FY2025. Its ma...

On 21 August 2026, Kakao's board approved a demerger. KakaoTalk and the company's AI stack go into a newly created listed entity, KakaoAI. The fintech, content and mobility holdings stay with the surviving entity, KakaoX. Existing shareholders receive shares in both, pro rata. An extraordinary general meeting is scheduled for 17 December, the demerger date is 1 January 2027, and KakaoAI is expected to relist on 27 January 2027. Most of the coverage argued about valuation — whether the conglomerate discount will close, whether retail shareholders are being handed the weaker half. Those are fair arguments. But the filing answers a different and more mechanical question first, and it answers it precisely. The ratio is a statement about the denominator The demerger ratio was set from book net assets: 0.6351463 to KakaoX, 0.3648537 to KakaoAI. That is a split of capital. It says how the balance sheet is being divided, and it is derived, not negotiated. Then the same disclosure ...

On 20 August 2026 Korea's Fair Trade Commission conditionally approved the Daesan No.1 combination, the first structural realignment submitted by the country's petrochemical industry. HD Hyundai Chemical will absorb Lotte Daesan Petrochemical, and Lotte Chemical and HD Hyundai Oilbank will each hold 50% of the merged entity and control it jointly. The number of domestic suppliers in low-density polyethylene and ethylene-vinyl acetate falls from four to three. After the deal, the top three will hold 82% of LDPE and 95% of EVA by sales volume. The remedies are entirely behavioural. For five years, domestic price movements in LDPE and EVA are benchmarked to export price movements. The companies must keep supplying every grade in production at the time of the combination when domestic buyers ask for it. Sharing of competitively sensitive information — prices, volumes, costs, inventory — is banned, as are dual appointments; staff returning to Lotte Chemical are excluded from LDPE ...