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<\/a><\/p>\nPublished On 1 Oct 20261 Oct 2026<\/p>\n
South Korea\u2019s exports have surged to a monthly record amid explosive demand for chips used to power artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Exports jumped 83.5 percent year-on-year to $120.9bn in September, eclipsing the previous monthly record of $102.25bn set in June, preliminary customs figures showed on Thursday.<\/p>\n
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Chip shipments accounted for nearly half of exports, soaring more than 260 percent to $60.3bn, according to data from the Korea Customs Service.<\/p>\n
Total exports from January through September hit $814.5bn, exceeding those for all of 2025, when exports reached a record $709.7bn.<\/p>\n
During the first nine months of the year, the country recorded a trade surplus of $49.85bn.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a valuable achievement that once again demonstrates the strength of our industries and companies, and is thanks to the sweat and efforts of our entrepreneurs who have competed fiercely in the global market,\u201d said Kim Jeong-kwan, South Korea\u2019s minister for trade and industry, in a statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile we expect to achieve $1 trillion in annual exports, the strengthening of global protectionism and tensions in the Middle East remain major variables affecting our exports,\u201d Kim said.<\/p>\n
South Korea\u2019s economy has been running red-hot this year amid a global shortage of memory chips used in AI.<\/p>\n
Asia\u2019s fourth-largest economy is home to one of the world\u2019s largest semiconductor industries, led by top memory chip makers SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics.<\/p>\n
SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics together control roughly 80 percent of the global market for high-bandwidth memory and 60 percent of the market for dynamic random-access memory, according to Counterpoint Research.<\/p>\n
South Korea\u2019s nominal gross domestic product (GDP) growth hit a five-decade high in the April-June quarter, skyrocketing 26.4 percent year-on-year.<\/p>\n
South Korea\u2019s Ministry of Finance and Economy has forecast real GDP to grow 3 percent in 2026, which would be the strongest performance since 2017, excluding the outlier years of the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
The AI boom has also propelled the country\u2019s stock market into the ranks of the best-performing bourses this year, with the benchmark Kospi rising nearly 60 percent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Exports jump 83.5 percent to top $120bn for the first time amid ferocious semiconductor demand. Published On 1…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":633059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,1631,2681,184,85,2682,46,43,11471,125],"class_list":["post-633058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-asia-pacific","tag-business-and-economy","tag-economy","tag-il","tag-international-trade","tag-israel","tag-news","tag-south-korea","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/633059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}