Six in 10 listed firms suffer decline in profits

By Kim Bo-eun

Sixty percent of the country's top 1,000 companies saw their profits fall in 2018 from a year earlier, according to a recent report. Yet the average wage of employees of 66.7 percent of these companies rose.

The report, released by the Korea CXO Institute, stated that 597 listed companies either saw their operating income decrease in 2018 from a year earlier or marked an operating loss.

Meanwhile, the average wage at the 1,000 companies stood at 55.37 million won ($46,706 million) last year, up 4.3 percent from a year earlier.

Among the 1,000 firms, 680 gave their employees raises.

Regarding wages, companies that had annual sales of more than 1 trillion won last year paid an average 71.28 million won to their employees, followed by those that made between 500 billion won and 1 trillion won which paid 62.94 million won.

Firms that generated between 100 billion won and 5 billion won paid 51.59 million won; and those that made less than 100 billion won paid 46.92 million won.

However, there was no correlation between companies' operating income and employee wages.

"The overall level of wages of companies here is relatively high," Oh Il-seon, director of the institute, said.

"It would be ideal for companies to raise wages of their employees while performing well, but this was not the case for many last year. When such circumstances continue, they pose risks for companies and lower their wage competitiveness," he said.

He pointed out that this could affect employment by preventing new recruitment or by laying off existing workers.

"Under such circumstances, companies will only have the choice of adopting more automation processes," Oh said.