SuperGardenKorea : Understanding Korea. Growing with Korea.

Honestly, I have a confession: the last piece was basically an excuse to write this one. While digging into what "Baedal Minjok" actually meant, I stumbled onto something I never expected — this company had already changed hands once before. And the app we all open without thinking, it turns out, has been quietly trading for trillions of won. I had no idea, until then, about Baemin's acquisition history. And I was honestly stunned that a piece of everyday infrastructure like this could move for that kind of money. So I decided to actually dig into it properly. This Is Actually the Second Time As it turns out, this isn't the first time "Baedal Minjok" has ended up under foreign ownership. In 2019, Woowa Brothers — the company that runs Baemin — was acquired by Germany's Delivery Hero (DH) for roughly 4.75 trillion won (around $3.2 billion). A company famous for its "We are the delivery nation!" patriotic branding wound up, at the very same...

I grew up hearing adults say it all the time. "We are the Baedal Minjok — be proud of it." I had no real idea what it meant. I just nodded along, sensing, vaguely, that it was something old and something to be proud of. And now I really have become part of the "delivery nation." A few days ago, on a stiflingly hot evening, I opened the Baedal Minjok app without a second thought. Then, mid-scroll, I caught myself trying to remember what those five syllables — Baedal Minjok — actually meant. Nothing came to mind. I've opened this app a few times a week for years, and somehow I'd completely forgotten the original meaning packed into its name. I felt a little ridiculous, googling it right then and there. "Baedal" Originally Had Nothing to Do With Food The "baedal" here isn't the delivery (配達) we all know — the one that brings fried chicken to your door. It's a different, older word: the one in "Baedal minjok," "Bae...

In the last piece , we talked about renewable energy's biggest weakness: intermittency. No sun, no wind, no power — however much you've built. But the companies that were supposed to solve that storage problem had, until recently, been struggling for a completely different reason. Korea Already Reached the Top Once Korea wasn't first to the battery business. But once it got there, it did surprisingly well, right from the start. LG Chem (now LG Energy Solution) began researching lithium-ion batteries in 1995, and by 1999 had become the world's second company — after Japan — to mass-produce them. Then, in 2020, LG Chem actually made it to the top. Riding strong sales of the Tesla Model 3 and Audi e-tron, it took the global lead in EV battery usage, overtaking both CATL and Panasonic. Samsung SDI and SK Innovation (now SK On) both landed in the global top ten the same year. A company that had walked a path nobody else had taken 25 years earlier had made it to the su...

The last piece ended with a question I didn't answer: if Korea decides to go all-in on renewables, how far can it actually get? Looking for that answer, I stopped on a number. According to Ember's Global Electricity Review 2025, renewables made up just 10% of Korea's electricity generation in 2024. The global average that same year was 32%. Then I found something else that stopped me a second time. The "10.6%" figure Korea's own government cites isn't quite "renewable energy" — technically, it's "new-and-renewable energy," a category unique to Korean law that lumps solar and wind in with hydrogen fuel cells, coal gasification (IGCC), and waste-to-energy. Under international standards, some of these wouldn't count as renewable at all. So Korea's domestic statistics and the numbers the world uses to compare countries look similar on paper, but they're not measuring quite the same thing. (For anyone tracking the numbers acr...

In the AI era, there's something as important as chips. It's electricity. On June 29, at an event called the "Korea's Great Leap Forward" briefing held at the presidential office, Samsung Electronics and SK hynix announced a massive investment plan: 800 trillion won ($580 billion) over the next decade, poured into Korea's southwestern Honam region alone. Honestly, a number that size doesn't really register with me. The very next day, the two companies' top executives headed straight to the site. In a meeting about semiconductors, the first thing they both emphasized wasn't chips. It was electricity. "A stable power supply matters more than anything else," said Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Jun Young-hyun. "We need a site with a large enough footprint and stable power and water supply," said SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung. Take the Yongin semiconductor cluster: the timeline for completing its national industrial complex...

Not a day goes by lately without unsettling news. This summer especially seems to bring more bad news than usual. Record-breaking heatwaves and wildfires across Europe, unpredictable downpours, one extreme weather headline after another. Climate change isn't a distant, future problem anymore. It's a problem we're living through today. So a question comes to mind: facing this shared global challenge, when did Korea start showing up? Korea's environmental push officially began in 2008, when the government made "Low Carbon, Green Growth" a national strategy. From there, it passed related legislation in 2010, introduced an emissions trading scheme in 2015 to bring carbon reduction into a formal system, and in 2020 declared it would reach carbon neutrality by 2050 — laying out a much clearer direction for the transition. Of course, by global standards, Korea wasn't an early mover. Europe and other frontrunners had already put climate change on the national ...

  Inside the meeting room, the numbers just won't line up. Both sides are digging in. By the third time the same sentence gets repeated, someone lets out a sigh and says it. "Let's eat first, then we'll talk." If you're the foreign partner in the room, this is the moment your eyebrows go up. Wait — are we stopping the meeting because we're hungry? The negotiation is stuck, everyone's on edge, and someone just suggested lunch. In the last piece, we looked at "Did you eat?" as a greeting, and "let's grab a meal sometime" as the phrase Koreans use to leave a door open when they part ways. But it turns out meals play an even bigger role once you step into a Korean business setting. The role just changes shape depending on where you are in the relationship. There's a meal that starts things off, a meal that keeps the door ajar, and — as in that tense meeting room above — a meal that talks a deal back from the edge. "Sha...