Venture Groups Urge Delay of KOSDAQ Tier System, Warning of Stigma on Growth Firms

*Editor's Note: 'AI PRISM' (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an "artificial intelligence (AI)-based customized news recommendation and summary service" developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six customized news items by reader type.

1. 'AI Assistant for All Citizens' to Arrive Within the Year

- Key Summary: MSIT and NIPA will issue a notice within this month to select the organization to carry out the "AI for All" project and will hold a public call for company consortiums. The service is a Korean-style ChatGPT equipped with agent functions in the education, public, daily life, and industry domains, aiming to ghostwrite administrative documents and support the work of the elderly and small business owners. Not only companies participating in the second round of independent foundation models, but any company utilizing a domestic LLM can join the consortium, and proposals mixing multiple models such as Upstage's "Solar" and SK Telecom's (017670) "A.X" are also possible. However, since selecting the consortium will take about a month and a half, development will not begin until after late July, and as the possibility of free provision until at least 2028 is being discussed, concerns over the profitability of participating companies are also growing.

2. Venture Industry: "KOSDAQ Tier System Brands Growth Firms... Should Be Delayed"

- Key Summary: Song Byung-jun, chairman of the Korea Venture Business Association, Kim Hak-kyun, chairman of the Korean Venture Capital Association, and Kim Jae-won, chairman of the Korea Startup Forum, held a joint press conference on the 15th and called for a delay in the push for the KOSDAQ tier system. The government is pursuing a plan to divide KOSDAQ into two categories, Premium and Standard, to increase the inflow of institutional investment, but the venture industry countered that companies in the Standard category could be branded as substandard. With the investment limit for domestic VCs in listed companies already capped at 20%, concerns were also raised that dividing the market would concentrate investment in a handful of companies. The associations called for the formation of a standing consultative body in which financial authorities and the venture industry would design policy together, and demanded complementary measures such as mandating that public funds like the National Growth Fund and pension funds invest in the Standard market.

3. 'Dancing Robot' Prices Plunge 72%... Sorting Out China's Humanoids

- Key Summary: The price of bipedal humanoid robots continues to plummet, with Noetix's "Bumi" — the top seller on Chinese e-commerce platform JD.com — selling for 9,118 yuan (about 2.04 million won). According to Unitree's IPO application, the unit price of humanoid robots fell 72%, from 593,400 yuan in 2023 to 166,400 yuan last year, while the daily rental fee also dropped from 25,000 yuan early last year to 2,199 yuan early this year. Entertainment and performance robots repeat pre-programmed movements, so the technological barrier to entry is low, and as a result, numerous companies are engaging in cutthroat competition to secure market share. By contrast, the price decline for industrial robots actually used in factories was only 13% year-on-year last year, and some manufacturers have even raised prices, citing rising costs of components and raw materials.

4. "Preparing for a Middle East New Normal"... Samsung Resets Business Strategy

- Key Summary: Samsung Electronics (005930) will hold global strategy meetings for its Device eXperience (DX) division and Device Solutions (DS) division in succession from the 16th to the 18th, completely realigning its second-half business strategy around AI transformation (AX). While the U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreement has somewhat reduced logistics and energy risks, uncertainties such as the high exchange rate remain, so the company plans to introduce AI across its global sales and distribution organizations to cut costs and maximize marketing efficiency. It will also immediately return about 120 Middle East-based expatriates, excluding those in Iran and Iraq, to active duty to pursue business-to-business (B2B) orders such as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) for AI data centers. Meanwhile, the DS division will review the supply status of HBM4 — sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to be installed in Nvidia's next-generation accelerator "Vera Rubin" — and refine its strategy to gain a head start with HBM4E, the world's first samples of which it has shipped.

5. "Tractors Alone Have Limits"... Farm Machinery Industry Competes for New Revenue Sources

- Key Summary: As major farm machinery markets contract — with U.S. agricultural tractor sales plunging 21.7% in just two years, from 250,265 units in 2023 to 195,857 units in 2025 — companies are diversifying their survival strategies. Daedong, based on 5.1 million pieces of physical AI (artificial intelligence that learns in real-world environments) training data collected over four years, is building three subscription-based services in precision agriculture, smart farming, and agricultural robots, targeting 330 billion won in revenue by 2030. Accordingly, LS Mtron raised its North American market share from 5% the previous year to 10% last year by leading with electric injection molding machines, while TYM is making a full-scale push into the European market, using its Dutch corporation as a base following its Canadian corporation in February. As the limits of the existing equipment sales-centered business model become clear, the shift to non-tractor businesses such as subscription services, global localization, and injection molding machines is accelerating across the industry.

6. Samsung Mobilizes 517 Supercomputers to Build Digital Twin

- Key Summary: Samsung Electronics' DX division has built 517 high-performance computing (HPC) servers at its data center in Sangam-dong, Seoul, and launched a digital twin (a virtual space that mimics reality)-based product verification service. The new HPC offers 5.8 times faster computing speed and six times more virtual verification capacity than before, and is expected to shorten TV drop testing from 15 days to 2 days and washing machine testing from 15 days to 5 days. Samsung Electronics is treating this HPC adoption as the starting point of its plan to convert all production plants at home and abroad into AI autonomous factories by 2030, aiming for a structure in which digital twins are introduced across all processes — from material receipt to production and shipment — and AI agents perform data analysis and advance verification. As virtual verification data accumulates, accuracy and scope of application will expand together, so Samsung's transition to AI autonomous factories is expected to accelerate further.