Winners & Losers

Daelim Industrial,

one of Korea’s major builders, announced Wednesday that both its sales and operating profits have increased in the first quarter of this year.

The company recorded some 2.52 trillion won ($2.27 billion) in sales and 123.9 billion won in operating profit, up 22.7 percent and 30.9 percent, respectively, from a year earlier.

The announcement came amid a series of gloomy reports by Korean construction firms, including GS Engineering and Construction and Samsung Engineering.

The builder aims to mark 10.9 trillion won in sales and 583.4 billion won in operating profit this year.

Daum Communications,

the operator of Korea’s largest web portals, said Tuesday that it will stop providing its social networking service (SNS). The company’s micro-blogging service “yozm” will be completely terminated by the end of August this year. The service allows users to post messages using 150 characters on their timelines.

Industry watchers said the Internet firm is closing down because of its inability to compete with its domestic and foreign competitors including Twitter and NHN’s me2day.

Since its February 2010 debut, yozm has been able to obtain only 3 million subscribers in Korea. This figure is significantly below me2day’s 12 million and Twitter’s 7 million.