About AI KEY
AI-powered Korean corporate intelligence for global investors
Our Mission
AI KEY transforms 25 years of Korean-language news data into actionable intelligence for global investors. Built on BigKINDS, Korea's most comprehensive news database, and powered by advanced AI analysis.
What We Do
Media Intelligence
We analyze millions of Korean news articles to extract sentiment, track narratives, and identify market-moving events.
Quantitative Analysis
Our AI models perform Granger causality tests, event studies, and multi-variable regression to quantify media-market relationships.
Global Access
We translate Korean corporate intelligence into English, Chinese, and Japanese, making it accessible to investors worldwide.
Our Methodology
AI KEY is built on BigKINDS, which aggregates content from 54 major Korean media outlets spanning over 25 years. Our pipeline applies advanced natural language processing to extract entities, sentiment, and topics from Korean-language articles. We then run statistical analyses including Granger causality tests, event studies measuring abnormal returns, and multi-variable regression models to quantify the relationship between media narratives and market movements.
KFTC-Designated Business Groups
The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) designates large business groups each year — statutorily on May 1, this year on April 29 — under the Monopoly Regulation and Fair Trade Act. The core purpose is to prevent excessive concentration of economic power: blocking ownership distortions, the formation of paper capital among affiliates, and the domino collapse of weaker subsidiaries through inter-affiliate guarantees. Each group is anchored by a designated controller— the natural person or top-level entity who in fact controls the group's business. The scope of an affiliate group is defined relative to that controller.
Designation is based on the previous year's total consolidated assets of all domestic affiliates (for financial-sector affiliates, the higher of equity or paid-in capital is used). Groups are split into two tiers; Tier 1 is a strict superset of Tier 2. Numbers and the affiliate roster are refreshed after each annual KFTC announcement.
- Cross-shareholding banned — affiliates cannot hold each other's shares.
- New circular shareholding banned — closes the loop on indirect mutual ownership.
- Inter-affiliate debt guarantees prohibited — weak subs cannot be propped up with group credit.
- Financial-affiliate voting rights restricted — client money cannot be used for control.
- Quarterly disclosure of group structure, executives, and shareholdings — for unlisted affiliates too.
- Large intragroup transactions require board approval and public disclosure.
- Unfair related-party support prohibited — cross-subsidies that distort competition.
- Controller-family self-dealing prohibited — tunneling of group resources to the family.
Source: Korea Fair Trade Commission — Large Business Group Policy page. Annual designation lists and per-group rosters are published on the KFTC corporate-group portal.
Team
AI KEY is a product of Seoul Economic Daily (SED), one of Korea's leading financial newspapers with over 60 years of history.
Contact
For inquiries: aikey@sedaily.com