Alteogen Raises 200 Billion Won to Build Plant, Diversify Platforms

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

1. Alteogen Draws 200 Billion Won From National Growth Fund, Others

- Key points: Alteogen has secured a total of 200 billion won in investment and will build a biopharmaceutical plant in Daejeon while diversifying its business. The company is issuing 100 billion won in convertible preferred shares (CPS) and 100 billion won in redeemable convertible preferred shares (RCPS), with the RCPS priced at a 10.3% premium to the reference price. Alteogen has built a structure centered on milestones and royalties, signing license agreements with 10 global drugmakers including MSD, AstraZeneca, Sanofi and Novartis based on ALT-B4, a technology used to convert drugs into subcutaneous (SC) formulations. "We judged it important to secure new growth drivers for the company's future now, rather than relying on a single platform," said Jeon Tae-yeon, chief executive of Alteogen. The new plant will produce ALT-B4, which is currently outsourced to contract manufacturers, as well as an Eylea biosimilar and eventually new drugs.

2. Elice Group Becomes This Year's First 1 Trillion Won KOSDAQ IPO as Price Set at Top of Range [Signal]

- Key points: Elice Group, an AI full-stack company pursuing a KOSDAQ initial public offering, set its final offering price at 90,500 won, implying a market capitalization of 1.0054 trillion won based on the number of shares expected to be listed. Mirae Asset Securities (006800) and Samsung Securities (016360) had proposed an indicative range of 70,400 to 90,500 won, and 97.8% of the 647,998,700 shares sought in the demand forecast were bid at or above the top of the range. Pricing at the top of the range will raise 201.1 billion won, which the company will spend on expanding AI infrastructure at sites in the greater Seoul area and other regions and on building advanced infrastructure dedicated to next-generation graphics processing units (GPUs). The company plans to hold a retail subscription on the 7th and 8th and list in late October. It is the first KOSDAQ listing with a market value above 1 trillion won at the final offering price in about 10 months, since Livsmed in December last year.

3. Platform CEOs Face Audit, Apologize One After Another Over Data Breaches

- Key points: Chief executives of platform companies that suffered personal data breaches appeared at the parliamentary audit, acknowledged lax security management and outlined plans for compensation and stronger security. "As the person responsible, I am sorry to the public, and I felt acutely that we had been negligent about security," said Choi Joo-hee, chief executive of Tving, where personal information from 39.54 million accounts was leaked in May this year. Rep. Lee Hoon-ki of the Democratic Party of Korea noted that Tving's dedicated information protection staff numbered just four while its revenue grew 26-fold over the past five years, from 15.5 billion won to 406.8 billion won. Separately, 4,131 payment records belonging to 2,671 customers were leaked at Toss Payments in September, while Healing Paper, operator of Gangnam Unni, leaked 1 million records of procedure information and 6,000 URLs for consultation photos. Hong Seung-il, chief executive of Healing Paper, pledged to more than triple its security staff and increase security spending 2.5-fold.

4. "Patent Infringement Now Joined by Rampant Technology Theft Breaching Suppliers to Bring Down the Whole Dam"

- Key points: According to National Police Agency data, 49 cases of semiconductor technology leakage were detected from 2022 through the end of July this year, of which 19, or 38.8%, were attempted transfers abroad. Shin Sang-gon, president of the Korea Intellectual Property Protection Agency, said of recent trends that "they are becoming more varied and more cunning, including poaching of personnel, hostile mergers and acquisitions, and technology theft through second- and third-tier suppliers." The agency cited a lack of security budgets and staff, failure to meet the legal requirement of "secrecy management" for trade secrets, and frequent job changes and departures among key researchers as reasons mid-sized and smaller companies are vulnerable. The agency also provides free trade secret and technology protection consulting to small businesses and plans to unveil a pilot service late this year in which AI automatically classifies the security grade of trade secret documents.

5. [Dawn] The Manufacturing Power America Missed

- Key points: In a column, reporter Lim Se-won noted that the seeds of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment, essential to advanced semiconductor processes, were sown in 1997 in a consortium of Intel, AMD, Motorola and three national laboratories under the U.S. Department of Energy. Intel brought the Netherlands' ASML into the consortium in 1999 on the basis of its mass production capability, and Silicon Valley Group of the U.S., which held optical technology, was acquired by ASML in 2001. ASML then expanded by joining hands with European component makers such as Germany's Zeiss and with Taiwan's TSMC, and even Intel, which bought a 15% stake for $4.1 billion in 2012, failed to take the lead. The Center for Technology and Statecraft (CTS), a think tank founded by former U.S. administration officials, estimated in a September report that China had brought in about 343 of ASML's immersion deep ultraviolet (DUV) machines. The writer assessed that the consequences of chasing only practicality and eliminating the manufacturing base weigh heavily.

6. Voice Phishing Losses Hit Record High; "A Preventive System Must Be Built"

- Key points: According to the Korea Inclusive Finance Institute, voice phishing losses totaled 1.2578 trillion won last year, a record high. Average losses per victim swelled about six-fold, from 8.62 million won in 2016 to 53.84 million won last year, and 94% of voice phishing cases from January to August this year began with a phone call or text message. Payment suspensions on accounts used for fraud by financial firms nearly doubled, from 57,990 in 2021 to 102,307 last year, but the share of losses refunded fell from 35.9% to 26.3%. The institute has proposed an early warning system that would link private-sector data on suspected fraud to remittance infrastructure such as the Korea Financial Telecommunications and Clearings Institute network, flagging risky transactions just before a transfer is executed.