▲ AI PRISM* Personalized Economic Briefing
* Editor's note: AI PRISM (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an artificial intelligence-based personalized news recommendation and summary service developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six news items tailored to each reader type.
[Key Issue Briefing]
■ K-Beauty as a Benchmark: From major British drugstore chains Boots and Superdrug to upscale department store Selfridges, K-beauty is moving beyond specialist online retailers and into consumers' daily routines. Sarah Robb, a U.K.-based cosmetics safety assessor, said K-beauty has moved past being a passing trend to become a firmly established presence in the market. Korean terms such as "ampoule" and ingredients such as PDRN are also working their way into how Western brands develop products.
■ New Carbon Market: GS Global (001250) is taking an equity stake in Hooxi Partners, a carbon credit specialist, moving in earnest into the emissions trading and brokerage market. The move targets as a new growth driver the trend of rising procurement burdens for companies as total emissions allowances shrink and paid allocation expands. The deal creates a structure combining the emissions-reduction capabilities of climate tech firm Hooxi Partners with the global network of a general trading company.
■ AI's Double-Edged Sword: A new model from China's DeepSeek took the top open-source spot in web development coding performance, surpassing some closed U.S. models. Conversely, a Chinese AI penetration-testing tool that had been released as open source shows signs of having been abused in attacks on financial and logistics firms in Korea and Japan. Meanwhile, the government is expanding information protection disclosure requirements to all listed companies starting next year, increasing pressure for security investment.
[News of Interest to Startup Founders]
1. "Learning Everything From Terms to Ingredients": K-Beauty Becomes the Western Standard
- Key summary: K-beauty has settled into mainstream British distribution channels and established itself as a benchmark for the Western cosmetics industry. In an interview with The Seoul Economic Daily, Sarah Robb, a U.K. cosmetics safety assessor, said K-beauty has moved past being a passing trend to become a firmly established presence in the market, adding that Western brands view it as an ideal standard to aspire to. Robb, who has prepared safety assessment reports for leading brands including Medicube and Anua since around 2020, noted how Korean-coined terms such as "ampoule" and ingredients such as PDRN are spreading to Western brands. APR (278470) posted a quadruple-digit percentage increase in U.K. revenue in the first half of this year from a year earlier, and its Zero Pore Pad has held the No. 1 spot in Amazon UK's toner category from December of last year to the present.
2. GS Global Widens Its Reach With Entry Into Carbon Credit Business
- Key summary: GS Global is partnering with carbon credit specialist Hooxi Partners to enter the emissions credit business in earnest. The plan is to turn greenhouse gas reductions secured from its existing eco-friendly businesses into assets and to extend its reach into trading and brokerage by combining a general trading company's global network and trading capabilities. Founded in 2021, Hooxi Partners handles the entire process, from developing emissions credit methodologies to identifying and operating reduction projects, securing Korean Offset Credits (KOC) and forward trading. Its revenue jumped to 3.2 billion won in 2025 from 200 million won in 2024, and it is projected to post revenue of 7.8 billion won and net profit of 3.3 billion won this year. The two companies also plan to identify additional reduction projects in areas such as electric bus conversion, solar power, biomass and resource recycling, and to win more projects from overseas clients.
3. DeepSeek Tops Open-Source Web Development Rankings, Beating Kimi K3 and GPT-6 Astra
- Key summary: V4.1-Flash-1017, a new model released by China's DeepSeek on the 17th, took the top open-source spot in web development coding performance on the AI evaluation platform Arena. It surpassed not only Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 but also some closed U.S. models, including OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 and xAI's Grok 4.7. Its bigger advantage is price: at $0.6 per million output tokens during off-peak hours, the fee is one-33rd that of GPT-5.6 Sol and one-42nd that of Claude Opus 5. Arena assessed that the model had entered the "Pareto frontier," meaning no model offers higher performance at lower cost. However, with 763 billion parameters, the model is too large to run on a personal computer and requires API access.
[Reference News for Startup Founders]
4. "Chinese AI Tool That Targeted Korean Financial Firms Also Attacked Japanese Companies"
- Key summary: The Chinese AI penetration-testing tool ARTEX was likely used in some of the cyberattacks that hit about 80 organizations in Japan, including insurers, financial firms and logistics companies. A security subsidiary of GMO Internet Group analyzed six publicly accessible overseas servers used in the attacks between the 18th of last month and the 18th of this month and found traces of ARTEX use on all of them. ARTEX is an autonomous program that connects to large language models (LLMs) to analyze targets and plan infiltration routes. In Korea, it was reportedly used in attacks that leaked about 100,000 pieces of information from 16 financial institutions, including Shinhan, KB Kookmin, Hana and Busan Bank. The tool, which had been switched to private, is set to be brought back by ThreatBook as a cloud-based paid service called RedAgent.ai, adding to the security burden.
5. Information Protection Disclosure to Become Mandatory for All Listed Companies Next Year
- Key summary: Information protection disclosure requirements will be sharply expanded starting next year to cover all listed companies, public institutions and financial firms. The Ministry of Science and ICT said a revised enforcement decree of the Information Security Industry Act cleared a Cabinet meeting on the 20th, removing the previous threshold of 300 billion won in annual revenue and making all companies listed on the KOSPI and KOSDAQ subject to the rule. Exemptions for public institutions, small businesses, financial firms and electronic financial business operators have been eliminated, and entities required to obtain Information Security Management System (ISMS) certification have been newly included. Small businesses, however, will be covered only from Jan. 1, 2029, in consideration of their business conditions. Bae Kyung-hoon, deputy prime minister and minister of science and ICT, said he hopes the expansion will help establish a virtuous cycle in which information protection investment becomes more active.
6. Reading Shop Stories and Hunting Hidden QR Codes: Jemincheon Alleys Bustle
- Key summary: The Jemincheon area in Gongju, South Chungcheong Province, where Kakao's (035720) local commerce revitalization program "Gotgot" is being held, bustled with visitors even on a weekday afternoon. Gotgot is a customer-participation local experience brand that grew out of the view that "Project Dangol," which supports the digital transition of small business owners, had its limits on its own. It consists of "Magazine Gotgot," which features the stories of about 40 businesses in the old downtown, and "Gotgot Walk," an offline event linking some 20 of them. Scanning each shop's QR code connects visitors to KakaoTalk channel discount coupons and Kakao Map reviews, while "Walk Bingo" incorporates Talk Digital Cards to tie together online and offline experiences. Kakao plans to open its brand intellectual property (IP) and operational know-how to merchants and local governments even after the event ends, helping them build their own momentum.
