9 Companies Announce Value-Up in H1... "Share Buyback Cancellation and Dividend Increase"

Exchange Announces Market Trends Related to H1 Value-Up Program
Share Buyback at 191%, Dividend Amount Up 3.7%

A total of nine companies announced plans to enhance corporate value in the first half of this year. The share buybacks and dividend amounts of listed companies also increased.

Korea Exchange, Yeouido, Seoul. Photo by Jinhyung Kang aymsdream@

On the 10th, the Korea Exchange announced through the '2024 First Half Corporate Value-Up Program Market Trends' that there were four announcements of corporate value enhancement plans and six preliminary announcements in the first half.

Kiwoom Securities, Kolmar Holdings, Meritz Financial Group, and FnGuide disclosed their corporate value enhancement plans.

Additionally, KB Financial Group, DB HiTek, Woori Financial Group, HK Innoen, and Kolmar BNH made preliminary announcements. In particular, there were relatively many value-up disclosures in the securities and banking sectors, which generally have low price-to-book ratios (PBR), including Kiwoom Securities, KB Financial Group, Woori Financial Group, and Meritz Financial Group.

Furthermore, as market participants and companies showed increased interest in shareholder returns, share buybacks surged by 190.5% compared to the same period last year, reaching 7 trillion KRW. SK Innovation (793.6 billion KRW), Samsung C&T (767.6 billion KRW), and Meritz Financial Group (640 billion KRW) conducted share buybacks.

Meanwhile, dividends paid by listed companies in the first half increased by 3.7% year-on-year to 34.2 trillion KRW.

An official from the Korea Exchange stated, "To enable institutional investors such as pension funds to use it as a benchmark indicator, the 'KRX Korea Value-Up Index' will be developed in the third quarter, and financial products such as index-linked exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and derivatives will be developed in the fourth quarter." He added, "The direction of tax support measures for value-up has been concretized through the recent announcement of the Ministry of Economy and Finance's Dynamic Economy Roadmap. Going forward, we plan to actively promote domestic and international investor relations (IR), and continuously encourage expanded corporate participation through various promotional activities such as meetings and education sessions for listed companies."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.