Daily Woody Weekly | Jul 25, 2026 — The KOSPI's 25% Month and a Tariff Timed to the Hour
The KOSPI closed Friday at 6,690.62, down 406.27 points or 5.72%, and the KOSDAQ shed 5.32% to 748.22. Both markets triggered sell-side sidecars, the KOSPI at 11:23 a.m. and the KOSDAQ 24 minutes later. Samsung Electronics fell 7.59% to 249,500 won (about $170) and SK hynix 8.34% to 1,759,000 won (about $1,200). Kia dropped 12.88% after disappointing earnings. Foreign investors sold 3.27 trillion won (about $2.2 billion) and institutions 1.95 trillion won; retail investors bought 5.18 trillion won and could not hold the line.
The trigger arrived from outside. Brent crude for September delivery rose 7.04% on Thursday to $100.69 a barrel, its first close above $100 since May 22. Yemen's Houthis had struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, and President Trump said he was weighing a large-scale strike on Iran. The US ten-year Treasury yield reached 4.71%, its highest since January 2025. Saudi Arabia had been routing crude west by pipeline to the Red Sea to bypass the closed Strait of Hormuz, so the Houthi blockade shut the detour as well as the original passage.
A day earlier the index had closed at 7,096.89, up 4.40%, and Friday was its first losing session in four. Widen the frame and the pattern changes: the KOSPI has fallen about 25% over the past month, so Friday extended a slide already well under way rather than opening one.
The swings themselves are becoming the story. Korea Exchange figures compiled by Seoul Economic Daily show 41 sidecars in 137 trading sessions this year, 10 in June and 12 in July. Since single-stock leveraged ETFs tracking Samsung Electronics and SK hynix launched on May 27, sidecars have fired on 23 of 28 sessions. This week alone brought four in five days, two of them buy-side. TradingKey reports that the Financial Services Commission will tighten deposit requirements on leveraged ETFs from July 31.
A sidecar suspends program sell or buy orders for five minutes when KOSPI 200 futures move 5% from the previous close and hold there for a minute. It is a circuit breaker for automated flow, not for the whole market. Korea permits leveraged ETFs tracking a single listed company, a product most major markets restrict, and two of the largest track the country's two memory chipmakers.
Oil and Treasury yields supplied the trigger; the amplifier was domestic and recent. Two stocks account for a large share of the index, leveraged products on those same two stocks arrived in late May, and volatility since has been severe enough to fire circuit breakers four days out of five. Investors watching Korea for a read on the AI trade are now reading two signals at once, and only one of them is about memory demand. The FSC rule change on July 31 is an admission of which signal Seoul thinks it can control.
The US Trade Representative announced final action in its Section 301 forced-labour investigations on July 23. Additional duties of 10% or 12.5% took effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern on July 24 across most of Chapters 1 to 97 of the tariff schedule. Economies that have adopted a forced-labour import ban, or promised one through a reciprocal trade agreement, drew 10%: Canada, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the United Kingdom and eleven others. Everyone else drew 12.5%. For Korea, Japan, the European Union, Taiwan and Switzerland the rate applies net of the most-favoured-nation duty on certain products.
Korea sits in the group of 54 economies judged to have neither adopted nor enforced such a ban, which puts it at 12.5%. That sits above Mexico and India, and above the rate Seoul argued for last month when it disputed the factual findings. USTR says the 60 economies covered account for 99.4% of US trade.
The sequence is worth laying out. In February the Supreme Court struck down the reciprocal tariffs built on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. On March 12 USTR opened 60 Section 301 investigations. Findings and proposed duties came on June 2, comments closed July 6, hearings ran July 7, and the final action landed on July 23 — hours before the 10% global tariff imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act expired at midnight. A separate overproduction investigation is still running. If it adds 2.5 percentage points or more, Korea's total passes the 15% ceiling Seoul negotiated earlier this year.
Six weeks separate the ruling that voided one legal basis from the opening of investigations that supplied the next. Four and a half months later the new duties began on the morning the old ones lapsed, with no gap. Read the calendar and the destination looks fixed while the route was assembled around it. Set the rates against the stated grounds and the reading gets firmer. An economy long accused of forced labour in its supply chains drew much the same duty as economies accused of paperwork failures, and a second investigation is already queued behind this one. What remains negotiable is which statute Washington invokes. The number arrives ahead of that conversation.
The Bank of Korea reported on July 23 that real GDP grew 0.6% from the previous quarter, three times its May projection. Exports rose 1.4% on semiconductors and machinery, facilities investment 0.2% and imports 0.8%. Because chip prices lifted the terms of trade, real gross national income grew at its highest rate since 1988.
Lee Dong-won, who heads one of the Bank of Korea's economic statistics departments, said full-year growth of 3% is reachable even if the third and fourth quarters average minus 0.1%. Korea has not grown 3% since 2021. He flagged two offsets: the Middle East ceasefire agreement is not being implemented as expected, and the base from a strong second half of 2025 is high. The central bank raised its policy rate to 2.75% from 2.50% on July 16.
Gross national income captures purchasing power rather than output. When it outruns GDP by this margin, the cause is usually price rather than volume — Korea sold its chips dearer, not merely in greater quantity. The gap is the first thing to close when memory prices flatten.
「Source ↗」 Newspim · Herald Business · Bank of Korea
Incheon Fire Headquarters declared the blaze at Coupang's Warehouse 32 fully extinguished at 8:35 p.m. on July 22. It had burned for 109 hours and 40 minutes, since starting on the sixth floor at 6:54 a.m. on July 18. Crews contained the main fire around 8 p.m. on July 20, at the 61-hour mark, and spent two more days on hot spots.
The building runs eight storeys and 299,000 square metres. Its sixth floor has a 10-metre ceiling divided into three tiers by steel mezzanine framing, packed with combustible goods. All 121 people inside evacuated without assistance; two firefighters were treated for smoke inhalation and exhaustion. Because of collapse risk, teams re-entered only after building stability checks, in groups of four rotating through a 16-member detail. The fire agency, the national fire research institute and the electrical safety corporation have opened a joint investigation, and police formed a dedicated unit. Coupang Fulfillment Services will fully compensate Rocket Growth sellers for lost inventory.
Coupang is Korea's largest e-commerce operator and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Rocket Growth is its programme for third-party sellers who store goods in Coupang warehouses and rely on its logistics, which is why the inventory loss falls on merchants rather than on the platform's own stock.
Nobody died and everyone walked out on their own, so the evacuation design worked. Extinguishing took four days, with collapse warnings and repeated withdrawals in between. Buildings designed to get people out and buildings designed to let firefighters put a fire out are not the same specification, and Korea's giant fulfilment centres have been built to the first. Whatever the joint investigation finds about ignition, the harder question is how anyone extinguishes a three-tier mezzanine under a 10-metre ceiling filled with packaged goods.
The Seoul High Court's Family Division 1 ordered SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won on July 24 to pay Roh Soh-yeong 944 billion won, about $645 million. Presiding judge Lee Sang-joo added 5% annual interest running from the day after the ruling until settlement. It is the largest divorce property award in Korean history. The court divided marital assets one-third to Roh and two-thirds to Chey, and kept the finding that his SK Inc. shares count as marital property.
The decisive question was when to value those shares. The court fixed the date at April 16, 2024, the close of evidentiary hearings in the appeal that preceded the Supreme Court's remand. SK Inc. traded near 160,000 won then and near 800,000 won by late June 2026. The award has moved from 66.5 billion won at first instance to 1.3808 trillion won on appeal in 2024, about $940 million, and now to 944 billion won. The Supreme Court had sent the case back after ruling that a 30 billion won slush fund from Roh's father, former president Roh Tae-woo, could not be counted as her contribution. Chey's representative said he would state a position after reviewing the judgment. SK Inc. closed 3.82% lower on Friday.
Chey and Roh married at the presidential Blue House in 1988, during her father's term. Chey holds 17.9% of SK Inc., the holding company that controls SK hynix, which listed in New York on July 10. Because Korean chaebol control runs through holding-company stakes, any order that touches those shares is read as a governance event, not only a family one.
The court accepted that founder-linked shares can become marital property when their value grows during a marriage, then stopped the clock two years before judgment. Those two rulings pull against each other, and the second one cost Roh roughly 430 billion won. It also removes the incentive to prolong proceedings while a stock climbs. For the next Korean controlling shareholder in divorce court, the fight will be over the date rather than the principle.
Samsung Electronics opened Korea's earnings season with preliminary second-quarter figures on July 7, and SK hynix reports on July 29. TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise 13% to 18% in the third quarter and NAND flash 10% to 15%. Those are marked reductions from the second quarter, when DRAM rose 58% to 63% and NAND 55% to 60%.
The research firm says DRAM supply remains very tight, but consumer electronics demand is slowing and the comparison base is already high. For NAND, it credits AI inference and data centre construction with driving demand while noting that record prices have reached the limit of what customers will absorb.
「Source ↗」 News1 · HuffPost Korea
Based on the Korea Meteorological Administration's 5 p.m. bulletin on July 24. Heat and tropical nights continue across most of the country through the weekend, with on-and-off rain concentrated in the capital region and Gangwon. Saturday brings mostly cloudy skies to Seoul and Gangwon with rain in inland and mountainous Gangwon, and afternoon showers in the Chungcheong provinces and on Jeju. Sunday turns cloudy nationwide with rain in the central region and North Gyeongsang.
| Sat 25 | Sun 26 | Mon 27 | Tue 28 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sky | Cloudy north | Cloudy | Cloudy central | Partly cloudy |
| Rain | Capital, Gangwon | Central, N. Gyeongsang | Capital, Gangwon | — |
| Low | 22–26°C | 22–26°C | 22–26°C | 22–26°C |
| High | 29–37°C | 29–37°C | 28–35°C | 29–37°C |
| Period | Area | Expected rainfall |
|---|---|---|
| Jul 24–25 | Northern Gyeonggi, West Sea islands | 20–60mm |
| Jul 25 | Seoul, Incheon, southern Gyeonggi | 5–40mm |
| Jul 24–25 | Northern Gangwon inland and mountains | 10–60mm |
| Jul 25 | Daejeon, Sejong, Chungcheong (showers) | 5–40mm |
| Jul 26 | Capital region, Gangwon | 10–50mm |
| Jul 26 | Daegu, North Gyeongsang | 5–40mm |
Korea collected three numbers this week. Growth of 0.6% for the second quarter. A tariff of 12.5%. And a Friday close 5.72% lower, capping a month that took roughly a quarter off the index.
The first came from semiconductors. Exports of chips and machinery lifted quarterly output, and because those chips sold dearer, national income grew at its fastest pace since 1988. The second is what the same exports now pay to enter an American port. The third came from the two companies that produced the first, on a day when oil above $100 and a 4.71% US ten-year yield sent capital out of anything priced for growth.
Each number has a public explanation, and in two cases the explanation sits at an angle to the dates. Washington's forced-labour investigations opened six weeks after a court voided the previous tariffs and concluded the morning their replacement lapsed. Seoul's own volatility runs through leveraged products on two stocks, launched in May, that have tripped circuit breakers on four days in five since.
An economy this concentrated does not get to choose which direction the concentration works in. This week it worked in both, and the ledger closed with the same industry on either side of it.
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