K-Fashion Wins Over Japan as Musinsa Sales Jump 182%

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

1. K-Fashion Platforms Shine in Japan, Speed Up Offline Expansion

- Key summary: Overseas sales at K-fashion platforms are growing rapidly across Asian markets, led by Japan, and are expanding into offline stores. Japanese transaction volume at Musinsa's Global Store surged 182% year-on-year in the second quarter of this year, following 116% in the first quarter, marking triple-digit growth for two consecutive quarters. Ably supports translation, customs clearance, delivery and customer service through its overseas sales platform Amood, and transaction volumes for its partner brands Lyny and Jasmine Bell rose 290% and 275% respectively from January to July this year. In the first half of this year, South Korea's net exports of clothing and bags reached $104.21 million to Hong Kong and $46.15 million to Taiwan, ranking second and third after the United States.

2. 'Preliminary Unicorn' Korea Credit Data Seeks Over 100 Billion Won in Pre-IPO Round

- Key summary: Korea Credit Data is pursuing investment of more than 100 billion won as it speeds up preparations for an initial public offering (IPO). As a pre-IPO deal, it is considering both a sale of stakes by existing financial investors (FIs) and a new share issue, and the company is valued at about 1.3 trillion won in this transaction. The company, which leads with Cashnote, a business management service for small business owners, posted consolidated revenue of 162 billion won last year, up 13.3% from 2024, while platform revenue jumped 119% to 33.1 billion won. Its adjusted EBITDA loss ratio narrowed from 20% to 11%. In December last year, monthly operating profit turned to the black, and the company plans to focus on improving profitability to achieve a full-year profit this year.

3. Hachitech Sets IPO Price at 23,000 Won, Bottom of Range, KOSDAQ Debut on the 25th

- Key summary: Hachitech, a semiconductor sensor integrated circuit (IC) fabless company, set its offering price at 23,000 won, the bottom of its target range. In the demand forecast held from the 3rd to the 7th of this month for 750,000 shares, or 75% of the total 1 million shares offered, 321 institutions took part, producing a competition ratio of 101.91 to 1. Following the general subscription on the 12th and 13th, it will list on the KOSDAQ on the 25th. Founded in 2017, Hachitech localized geomagnetic sensors and brought the entire process in-house, from device and circuit design to mass production, lifting its share among domestic smartphone makers from 0.3% in 2022 to 43% last year. It plans to invest the funds raised in expanding into high-precision markets such as robotics, data centers, mobility and healthcare.

4. SI Firms Take the Baton on Factory Robots, Speed Up Unmanned Manufacturing

- Key summary: Major systems integration (SI) firms are accelerating the shift to unmanned manufacturing sites with businesses that integrate control of robots in production processes. LG CNS (003550) built a SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system at HD Hyundai Electric's (267260) Cheongju distribution campus, tying depalletizing robots, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and autonomous case-handling robots (ACRs) into a single operating system. POSCO DX (022100) built a continuous-process system at POSCO Mobility's Pohang and Cheonan plants, and Samsung SDS is pursuing a "robot orchestration" business that links robots with manufacturing execution systems (MES), renaming its organization the RX Execution Group. Meanwhile, inquiries from small and mid-sized firms are rising, citing labor cost savings, 24-hour operation and the replacement of high-risk processes.

5. Three AI Firms 'Jailbroken'—Was an Israeli Testing Company the Problem?

- Key summary: The company handling AI model safety tests for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta was confirmed to be the Israeli startup Irregular in all three cases. U.S. broadcaster CNBC reported on the 9th, local time, that hacking incidents involving outside organizations during the three firms' internal security testing all occurred during Irregular's testing. OpenAI said there was an error in a component of Irregular's testing environment setup that allowed the model to access the internet, and Irregular said the three incidents stemmed from the same evaluation environment issue, explaining that they were unrelated to sandbox (isolated testing environment) escapes or sophisticated cyberattacks and that no issues remained unresolved. Irregular raised $80 million from Sequoia and Redpoint Ventures and was valued at $450 million last year, but some are pointing to the risks of a security verification structure that relies on a single provider.

6. Xiaomi Poaches ByteDance Robot Chief—Even Its Staff Didn't Know for a Year

- Key summary: Kong Tao, who led ByteDance's robot team, was confirmed a year later to have been overseeing the foundation model team at Xiaomi's robotics division since last summer. Xiaomi's robotics division, with about 200 people, researches robot hardware, artificial intelligence (AI) foundation models and robot operating systems (OS), and the move was tightly concealed even within the company through measures such as running a separate office. ByteDance, in turn, recruited robotics personnel who came from Xiaomi and DeepSeek's core researcher Guo Daya, and DeepSeek attracted its first outside investment since its founding before moving to double its workforce. As of July last year, new AI job postings in China rose more than tenfold from a year earlier, with some computer science doctoral graduates from Tsinghua University receiving starting salaries of more than 6 million yuan (about 1.2 billion won).