The crash of Seoul’s Kumkang Valve Mfg. Ltd. came not because orders dried up but after the fallout from currency contracts that Chief Executive Officer Choi Kyung Shik signed with banks and now says he didn’t understand, Bloomberg reported. In September, Kumkang filed for bankruptcy because of changing exchange rates and terms of the deals. In November, one bank closed the last of Choi’s contracts, costing him $15 million, half of his annual revenue last year. Choi’s firm joined more than 50,000 businesses around the globe that are in a similar predicament.

South Korea's seventh largest shipping line Samsun Logix has filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection in Manhattan, Seatrade Asia reported. Samsun Logix has more than $100 million of assets and debts, the firm said in its filing. A series of firms failing to pay charter hire sent Samsun to the wall. It filed for court receivership in Seoul in February. Established in 1980 as Samsun Shipping Corporation, the firm maintains it was not paid fees worth $40 million by a Swiss company which filed for bankruptcy protection late last year.

Global Business System Corp. has become the first Kospi-listed company ordered to go into bankruptcy by the Seoul Central District Court since the global economic crisis, the JoongAng Daily reported. The court said yesterday that the Seoul branch of Netherlands-based ABN Amro Bank filed a bankruptcy petition against GBS Corp. in November 2008 after the bank failed to collect $6 million in bonds from GBS. “GBS Corp.

A subcontractor that supplied Ssangyong Motor with parts for all car models has gone belly up, raising a red flag for the recovery of the automaker, The Chosun Ilbo reported. Representatives of an association of about 250 Ssangyong subcontractors asked the automaker's court receivers for emergency funds in a meeting at Posteel Tower building in Seoul on Wednesday. Ssangyong is receiving components again after moving the parts production machine operated by the supplier that went bankrupt the previous day to another subcontractor.

Ssangyong Motor Co., South Korea’s smallest carmaker, was placed in bankruptcy protection after vehicles sales tumbled 30 percent last year, Bloomberg reported. Park Young Tae, Ssangyong’s current financial director, and Lee Yoo Il, a former Hyundai Motor Co. president, will act as receivership managers, the Seoul Central District Court said in a faxed statement today. The court could still seek liquidation if the managers’ turnaround plan is deemed unviable.

The delinquency rate of South Korean credit card firms rose in the fourth of last year from three months earlier amid the ongoing economic slumping, the Korea Times reported on Thursday. The default ratio of Samsung Card and four other card firms reached 3.43 percent at the end of last year, up 0.15 percentage point from three months earlier, data from the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) showed.

Ssangyong Motor, which practically ground to a halt on January 9 when it filed for court receivership, will resume operations on February 2, The Chosun Ilbo reported. Judges from the Seoul Central District Court will inspect the automaker's only plant for finished cars on Thursday to determine whether to grant receivership to the automaker sometime in the first week of February. Ssangyong suspended operations after filing for court receivership because some subcontractors refused to supply parts since they had not been paid for goods already delivered when the carmaker hit the skids.

Ailing South Korean automaker Ssangyong Motor, which is seeking court receivership to avoid bankruptcy, announced it has suspended production because of a lack of parts, Agence France-Presse reported. Operations at the company's only plant at Pyeongtak, 70 kilometres (43 miles) south of Seoul, will stop indefinitely, the Chinese-owned firm said. A Ssangyong spokeswoman told AFP the supply of auto parts would likely resume only after a local court gives a final ruling on the firm's application for protection from creditors.

Corporate earnings will continue to slump into the first half of 2009 amid the first simultaneous recessions in the U.S., Japan and Europe since World War II, Bloomberg reported on analyst estimates. While profits will rise 4.3 percent for the full year in the U.S., earnings in Europe are projected to decline for all of 2009 and analysts predict worsening reports out of Asia because the recession hasn’t fully hit there yet. Earnings at European oil companies may drop 21 percent in 2009, compared with a 4.7 percent gain last year, according to estimates.

Export-reliant Asian economies showed more signs of weakness on Friday, with Japan's industrial output diving at a record pace and South Korea warning it faces an "unprecedented crisis" as global demand wilts, Reuters reported. Even the once unstoppable Chinese economy is feeling the strain, with companies recording a sharp slowdown in profit growth in the first 11 months of the year. On top of Japan's steep fall in industrial output in November, core consumer inflation fell faster than forecast last month, putting the shrinking economy on course for a spell of deflation next year.