S/Korea’s corporate earnings over doubled in 2021

South Korea’s corporate earnings more than doubled last year due to economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, statistical office data showed on Thursday.

The pretax net income of 13,448 companies, which hired at least 50 regular employees and had 300 million won ($230,770) or more in paid-in capital, totalled 222.4 trillion won ($171 billion) in 2021.

This is an improvement up by 127.6 per cent from a year earlier, according to Statistics Korea.

It has marked the fastest increase since the office began to compile relevant data in 2006.

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The data compilation did not include those of finance and insurance companies.

Revenue for the companies advanced by 16.9 per cent to 2,760 trillion won ($2.12 trillion) last year.

This is the highest yearly expansion.

The economic turnaround from the COVID-19 pandemic record drove the growth.

South Korea’s export jumped 25.7 per cent over the year to hit an all-time high of $644.4 billion in 2021.

Bolstered by robust export, pretax net income among manufacturers more than doubled to 143.6 trillion won ($110.5 billion) in 2021.

This is compared to 61.5 trillion won ($47.3 billion) in the previous year.

Electricity and natural gas sector’s pretax net profit plummet from 3.3 trillion won ($2.5 billion) in 2020 to 1.7 trillion won ($1.3 billion) in 2021.

This is amid higher commodity prices. (Xinhua)