Woori, LG Biggest Losers in Wall Street
By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter
A host of Korean stocks traded on U.S. stock exchanges halved in terms of their share prices last year because of the global financial crisis, the origin of which was Wall Street.
Among them, Woori Financial Group, LG Display and KB Financial Group were the biggest losers, excluding a couple of small-cap Internet start-ups, according to the Financial Supervisory Services Friday.
The stock price of Woori plunged 76.1 percent from $59.63 at the end of 2007 to $14.27 last year. Its flagship subsidiary Woori Bank is the country's third-largest lender by asset chasing top player KB and runner-up Shinhan.
That of LG Display, the world's No. 2 manufacturer of flat-panel displays, plummeted 68.1 percent from $25.98 to $8.28 during the same period. .
Business bellwether KB followed in the underachievers' list as its share price dipped 64.3 percent from $73.32 in 2007 to $26.2 last year.
Included among other Korean companies in which equity prices more than halved on the U.S. bourse are Shinhan Financial Group (58.9 percent) and the country's most prominent iron producer POSCO (50 percent).
``First of all, the low share price is not specific to us because most companies in the world suffered a free fall in share prices last year,'' a Woori spokesman said.
``But our share prices went down relatively more. Traditionally, we have been undervalued in comparison to KB and Shinhan for some reason. That seemed to work last year once again,'' he said.
Stocks of the aforementioned companies are exchanged on the New York bourse through the use of American Depository Receipt (ADR), which is issued by U.S. depository banks.
According to Wikipedia, ADR enables U.S. investors to buy shares in foreign companies without undertaking cross-border transactions. ADRs carry prices and pay dividends in dollars and can be traded like the shares of U.S.-based firms.
Things are almost the same for domestic companies traded in Europe through the Global Depository Receipt (GDR).
The stock price of Lotte Shopping fell 62 percent in Europe last year, followed by the preferred share of Samsung Electronics with 52.9 percent and that of LG Electronics with 52.6 percent.