KOSPI · December 10, 1998

The day the conglomerates agreed to restructure

+7.80%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Korea's post-IMF rebound

midway through · 1998-06-16 → 1999-04-27, +183.56% over the whole period

What happened that day?

The KOSPI rose 7.8% on the day
The big conglomerate groups agreed to hand overlapping businesses to one another and consolidate them — in semiconductors, cars, power equipment and similar fields
One cause of the crisis had been those groups investing in the same businesses on borrowed money, with affiliates guaranteeing each other's debts so that one failure pulled down the rest
Consolidating the businesses reduces the duplicated investment, and the debt with it
The process did not go smoothly and took years of friction. But the market responded to the direction being set
Foreign buying grew sharply in this period, as Korea began to be seen as a country actually restructuring

Sources

Every figure on this page is recomputed from the original daily closing prices and checked against them at build time. The account of what happened is written from the sources listed above.