SEOUL — Seoul Economic Daily on the 28th launched Atlas (en.sedaily.com/atlas), a data platform that lets foreign investors see the structure of Korean companies at a glance, from designated controlling shareholders and circular shareholdings to the tangled web of affiliates.
Atlas is available in Korean, English, Chinese and Japanese. It connects corporate ownership structures, government policy, parliamentary legislation and news coverage on a single data map, allowing users to examine Korean companies from multiple angles. The platform analyzes 50 government policies since 1998, 118,602 related articles and stock price data for 906 listed companies, bringing together policy, news and market movements.
Specifically, Atlas allows users to look into the ownership structures of Korea's large business groups. It visualizes the designated controlling shareholders of the 102 business groups named by the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) this year, along with 4,167 affiliates and 345 listed companies. Graphs trace the chain of control from a listed company's largest shareholder up through successive largest shareholders to the designated controlling shareholder at the top of the group, and map ownership relationships across the entire group. Shareholding ties and changes in ownership structure at major groups including Samsung, SK, Hyundai Motor, LG and Lotte can also be viewed on interactive screens.
The platform also offers content explaining Korean corporate rules that are unfamiliar to foreign readers. A prime example is its guide to the designated controlling shareholder system. It explains, step by step, the concept itself, the scope of related parties including relatives, affiliates and executives, and how affiliate status is determined. The guide covers the system's history from its introduction in 1987 to this year's designation involving Coupang, and includes a simulation that lets users change conditions themselves to check whether a company would be counted as an affiliate.
Atlas also provides data journalism content that combines articles accumulated by Seoul Economic Daily with corporate and market data. The platform currently holds data on 121,954 policy-related articles.
Users can also compare news coverage and stock price movements on a single screen. Working with the Financial Machine Learning Lab at Sogang University's Industry-Academic Cooperation Foundation, the paper used artificial intelligence to analyze 50 government policies, 118,602 articles and stock price data for 906 listed companies from 1998 to 2024. A full comparison of 110.49 million article-stock pairs found that on days when a company's name appeared in an article ahead of a policy announcement, the stock's price swing was 1.17 times its usual level. The timing of news and stock price moves differed by sector.
Atlas plans to continue expanding its data on government policy, parliamentary legislation and news coverage. It will also introduce a chatbot and summary report service that lets users grasp the moves of companies, the government, the National Assembly and the media at a glance.
