▲AI PRISM* Customized Economic Briefing
*Editor's Note: 'AI PRISM' (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an "artificial intelligence (AI)-based customized news recommendation and summary service" developed with the support of the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six customized news items for each reader type.
[Key Issue Briefing]
■ M&A Super-Cycle: Global M&A, IPO, and private fundraising in the first half of this year reached $3.2 trillion, up 45% from a year earlier and marking the largest half-year figure in the past decade. Mega-deals worth $10 billion or more led the boom, while transactions among small and mid-sized firms contracted, highlighting a clear polarization centered on large corporations.
■ Talent Exodus: The number of Chinese talents who returned home last year reached a record 536,000, and an unusual case emerged in which a 24-year-old doctorate holder was appointed as a doctoral advisor at Peking University. As a result, China's competition to secure high-level talent is accelerating further amid the United States' anti-immigration and R&D-reduction stance.
■ Research Hours Deregulation: When the ruling party signaled the possibility of easing the 52-hour workweek regulation for R&D personnel within mega special zones, the business community responded with a welcome. Meanwhile, concerns were also raised that the effectiveness could be halved due to inadequate residential conditions.
[News of Interest to Startup Investors]
1. AI-Driven M&A Frenzy…Corporate Deals Hit 10-Year High
- Key Summary: In the first half of this year, corporate deals including global M&A, IPOs, and private fundraising reached $3.2 trillion, up 45% from a year earlier, marking the largest half-year figure in the past decade. According to a New York Times report citing Dealogic data, 44 mega-deals worth $10 billion or more were completed, leading the boom, but the total number of deals actually fell 1%. NextEra's $118 billion acquisition of Dominion Energy and SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor are cited as representative examples. The U.S. IPO market also hit $155 billion, the largest since 2021, but about one-third of companies listed in the second quarter are currently trading below their offering prices.
2. A 24-Year-Old Professor at Peking University…536,000 Chinese Elites Return
- Key Summary: According to China's Ministry of Education, the number of Chinese talents who returned home last year reached a record 536,000. Tang Chenyu, a 24-year-old professor appointed as an assistant professor at Peking University's School of Information Engineering this May, has also taken on the role of doctoral advisor, an unusual case not only at Peking University but across all Chinese universities. Chinese companies such as Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba are also successively recruiting researchers from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, joining the competition to secure talent. According to an analysis by Stanford University's Hoover Institution, 70.3% of researchers with U.S. experience among those who participated in DeepSeek's early papers have now settled in China.
3. Coupang Launches 'Rocket Pay' for Online and Offline Payments
- Key Summary: Coupang announced on the 10th that it will launch Rocket Pay, a payment service usable both online and offline, in the second half of this year. Rocket Pay supports linkage with various payment methods including bank accounts, credit and debit cards, and stored balances, and also provides multiple payment authentication methods. It expands Coupang Pay, previously used on Coupang, Coupang Play, and Coupang Eats, to offline and non-Coupang merchants. Coupang explained that it has established a payment monitoring system operating around the clock, 365 days a year, based on its experience operating payment traffic worth tens of trillions of won annually.
- Key Summary: When the Democratic Party of Korea signaled the possibility of easing the 52-hour workweek regulation for R&D personnel within mega special zones, the business community responded with a welcome. The case of Taiwan's TSMC (a Taiwanese semiconductor foundry company), which has operated the Nighthawk Project running R&D in three 24-hour shifts since 2014, is cited as grounds. Major countries such as the United States and Japan have also been found to operate exemptions from working-hour regulations for high-income professional workers. However, concerns are also being raised that since most R&D personnel at Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and SK hynix (000660.KS) are concentrated in the Seoul metropolitan area, the effect of deregulation could be only partial if residential conditions are not in place.
▶Go to article: 140 Billion Won in Retail Stocks Forcibly Liquidated in a Day…Fallout from Extreme Volatility
▶Go to article: "Taxation Where There Is Income" Gains Momentum, But…Concerns Over "Higher Volatility"
