In Korea, more babies are born in places where chips are made

Parents and their young children spend time together at a slime pop-up event held at a department store in Dongtan District, Hwaseong Special City, Gyeonggi Province on July 29. Korea Times photo by Moon Ji-soo

In Korea, the places where chips are made also happen to be where more children are born.

“An obstetrician tells me everyone in this neighborhood has two or three kids,” said Shin Jung-won, 39, who has worked as a researcher at Samsung Electronics for 15 years. Due to give birth soon, she has a family plan shared by many residents in the neighborhood: to have two children.

Shin lives in Dongtan District in Hwaseong Special City, the place she settled three years ago due to its close proximity to her workplace — a Samsung Electronics campus is located there — and had a young population with many children. That day, as Shin headed to a department store just below her apartment, the indoor space was full of young parents with children, many pushing strollers, even on a weekday morning. Shin herself was also on parental leave.

Bonuses are the most frequently discussed subject among her colleagues, according to Shin. Although she is not part of the semiconductor division that received such exorbitant sums, she has heard how many inside the company openly talk about plans to earn 3 billion won (around $2.1 million) over three years before retiring.

“Many people around me now say working in the chip sector is better than going to medical school, which takes so much time and money,” she said. “Frankly, as long as the boom lasts, it wouldn’t be a bad industry for my child to work in.”

As in Taiwan, the locations of Korea’s chip factories are becoming increasingly easy to identify on a map of fertility trends. According to a Hankook Ilbo analysis of data from the Korean Statistical Information Service, the average total fertility rate in five regions that are home to major semiconductor hubs with fabrication plants — Yongin, Hwaseong, Pyeongtaek and Icheon in Gyeonggi Province, and Cheongju in North Chungcheong Province — stood at 0.9 in 2024, some 20 percent higher than the national average of 0.75. In Hwaseong, where Dongtan is located, the rate reached 1 percent.

Image generated using artificial intelligence

According to the Hwaseong city government, 8,116 babies were born in the city last year, the highest number among all municipalities nationwide. The figure also accounted for more than 10 percent of all babies born in Gyeonggi Province, the nation’s most populous province, which recorded 77,782 births in 2025.

The city also has a large student population. Hwaseong has 138,763 school-age residents between the ages of 7 and 18. According to resident registration data from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, school-age residents account for 13.9 percent of Hwaseong’s population, the highest share among Gyeonggi Province’s 31 cities and counties. Of those students, more than half, or 72,084, live in Dongtan District.

Behind the city’s distinctive demographic trend are the high-paying, desirable jobs created around the semiconductor industry, which are drawing young people and their families. Kim Sun-hee, 44, who has two school-age daughters two years apart, said her family moved to Dongtan four years ago to ease the commute for her husband, the family’s sole breadwinner, who works for a semiconductor supplier.

According to the Hwaseong City Research Institute’s analysis of 10 years of change-of-address records, people in their 20s and 30s accounted for 33.6 percent of Hwaseong’s net influx since 2014, or 184,822 of 549,022 people, signaling a rise in the younger population. Employment was the most commonly cited reason for moving to the city, at 36 percent, followed by housing at 27.8 percent and family at 25.6 percent.

National Tax Service data showed the average pay per worker in the city stood at the comparatively high level of 53.48 million won, higher than in 15 of Seoul's 25 districts. The 10 exceptions included Gangnam, Seocho and Yongsan.

Private academies pack a commercial building near Dongtan Station in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, on July 29. Korea Times photo by Moon Ji-soo

With large numbers of financially comfortable young parents in the area, education spending is perhaps unsurprisingly high. Park Hyun-min, 15, said he attends three academies for mathematics, Korean and English, which are fewer than many of his peers. Many students take additional courses in other subjects, such as science, he said.

Yang, a woman in her 40s, said she sends her middle school-aged daughter to four different academies. “When I add money to the local currency, I receive a 10 percent bonus, so I use it to pay her academy fees,” she said. “Other mothers also set alarms and wait to top up their accounts on the first day of every month.”

Across the major commercial districts around Dongtan Stations, office buildings are packed with private academies. In most buildings, academies occupy nearly every floor from the second story to the top, and several buildings house more than 20 of them. “Restaurants are leaving one after another, and academies are taking their place,” said Jo Soo-hyun, a real estate agent.

As of May, Dongtan’s nine administrative neighborhoods had a total of 1,962 college entrance exam and subject-based academies, more than the 1,293 in the three administrative neighborhoods that make up Daechi-dong, Seoul’s private education hub, according to Small Business 365, a big-data platform operated by the Korea SMEs and Startups Agency.

Even with so many academies, parents and students are said to routinely face waiting lists for consultations and enrollment. Faced with an influx of students, one academy near the subway station was seen expanding to 13 classes, each with a capacity of 40 students.

For Dongtan’s top-performing students, engineering is considered nearly as attractive as medical school. Kim Hee-won, 41, who runs a Korean language academy, said the semiconductor boom and the stable, well-paying careers of many parents have made engineering highly popular among high-achieving students.

“Even students preparing for medical school tend to think, ‘If that doesn’t work out, I can always study engineering,’” Kim said.

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.