South Korea's economic growth rate is expected to slow down in 2025.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) lowered its economic growth forecast for Korea in 2025 from 2.3% in September last year to 2% in its Asian Development Outlook December 2024 released in December. The economic growth forecasts for Korea next year released in December by eight major global investment banks (IBs), including Citibank, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, were also lowered by 0.2% from the previous month to an average of 1.8%. With the overall economic growth rate expected to slow down, domestic companies are also struggling to find ways to overcome the crisis, considering the sluggish domestic demand, increasing labor cost burden, and unstable domestic and international situations.
Accordingly, many companies are shifting their management tone to 'austerity' next year, prioritizing cost reduction and human resource efficiency. According to the '2025 Corporate Management Outlook Survey' conducted by the Korea Employers Federation last year on CEOs and executives of 239 domestic companies, 49.7% of companies that established management plans for next year responded that they plan to implement austerity management. Only 28% and 22.3% of companies said they would maintain the status quo or expand management, respectively. In particular, 61% of companies with 300 or more employees responded that they would implement austerity management, showing that large companies have a stronger austerity management tone. The most common specific implementation plan was company-wide cost reduction (66.7%), followed by rationalization of human resource management (52.6%) and reduction of new investment (25.6%).
In this economic trend, startup services that enable companies to reduce incurred fees or streamline and optimize work procedures to efficiently use labor costs are attracting attention.
◆ Establishing an optimized operating method for industrial sites using generative AI (artificial intelligence), Oasis
Developed by KAIST faculty startup Omelette (CEO Jin-gyu Park), Oasis (OaaSIS) is an AI solution that determines the optimal operating method in industrial settings. It is particularly useful for work distribution and route efficiency, which are core competencies in the distribution and logistics industry.
Oasis uses AI to repeatedly infer and calculate to build an optimized solution for a given problem. For example, a logistics company inputs a list of items to be delivered, and then inputs weights for each goal it is aiming for, such as ‘minimizing delivery time’, ‘minimizing travel distance’, and ‘compliance with delivery time’, and then provides a delivery route based on this. It can also reflect constraints that must be met, such as work hours, volume, and region.
Oasis is currently conducting proof of concept (PoC) of its core technology with food delivery platforms, courier companies, and pharmaceutical delivery companies, and plans to release it in the form of a software package that can be used by all logistics companies in the near future. In addition to the logistics field, it plans to apply it to various industrial fields such as protein molecule composition optimization for new drug development and semiconductor design optimization.
◆ Sentbiz improves management efficiency by reducing fixed costs and simplifying procedures incurred during overseas remittances and payments
'Sentbiz', a corporate overseas remittance and payment service introduced by global foreign exchange total solution company Sentbe (CEO Seongwook Choi), helps reduce costs for companies that require overseas trade payment and settlement, simplify work procedures, and improve management efficiency.
It provides services with fees up to 70% lower than the high fixed costs and exchange fees incurred when sending money overseas using existing banks. Unlike commercial banks, there are no receiving or brokerage fees, and the low exchange and fixed fees are the main factors leading to the selection of corporate business operators including companies. Fast and safe remittance is possible within 1 day, and remittance work can be done without additional registration after registering corporate documents only once, eliminating the inconvenience of entering information every time. By simply registering recipient information in Excel, even large-scale remittance work can be easily and conveniently carried out, reducing the time and cost invested in related work and enabling efficient human resource management. Accordingly, it is receiving great response from companies that require frequent overseas remittances and payment/settlement and those in charge of related work.
In addition, we thoroughly manage all risks that may arise during remittance and payment through the Legal & Compliance division, an organization comprised of domestic and international financial lawyers, and operate a dedicated CS organization for companies that can respond immediately to customer inquiries. These efforts are working as competitiveness in terms of service stability, convenience, and rationality, and more than 900 corporate customers who require overseas payment and settlement, including e-commerce, are using Sentbiz.
◆ Granter makes it easy and convenient to analyze and classify cumbersome corporate deposits and withdrawals, and even issue tax invoices, with AI
Granter (CEO Lee Young-in) is an artificial intelligence (AI) service that comprehensively manages corporate financial accounting, helping companies manage their accounting efficiently. The difference from existing accounting management solutions is the simplification of the introduction and installation process. Granter is a SaaS (software as a service) service that applies cloud technology, allowing you to easily and conveniently handle work through the web or mobile app in an environment with internet access.
Previously, business managers had to check the deposit and withdrawal details for each account or card and classify the appropriate account subjects, but with Granter, payment details within the company can be checked in real time, and AI analyzes deposit and expenditure data and automatically classifies them by type, which greatly reduces cumbersome repetitive tasks. Another advantage is that systematic financial management is possible without specialized personnel. In addition, various tasks, including tasks related to tax invoices and electronic approvals, can be easily and conveniently processed. If you link to Hometax, you can check the tax invoice issuance details in bulk, and it also provides a function to issue tax invoices on Granter, send them to Hometax, and send them to business partners.
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