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17-10-2022, 07:48 PM
SEOUL: Shares of South Korea's Kakao Corp plunged on Monday (Oct 17) after a widespread outage in the country's largest mobile chat app triggered a sharp political backlash and calls for increased scrutiny of the company's market dominance.
The outage was caused by a fire at a data centre south of Seoul on the weekend.
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President Yoon Suk-yeol said on Monday that Kakao's services are "like a fundamental national telecommunications network as far as the public is concerned", and promised follow-up measures over the service outage.
"If the market is distorted in a monopoly or severe oligopoly, to the extent where it serves a similar function as national infrastructure, the government should take necessary measures for the sake of the people," Yoon added, noting South Korea's antitrust watchdog would examine the matter.
Kakao shares plunged more than 9 per cent on Monday to their lowest since May 2020, while shares in Kakao affiliates KakaoPay and KakaoBank also plunged more than 8 per cent in morning trade.
More at: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business...mp-3010836
The outage was caused by a fire at a data centre south of Seoul on the weekend.
......
President Yoon Suk-yeol said on Monday that Kakao's services are "like a fundamental national telecommunications network as far as the public is concerned", and promised follow-up measures over the service outage.
"If the market is distorted in a monopoly or severe oligopoly, to the extent where it serves a similar function as national infrastructure, the government should take necessary measures for the sake of the people," Yoon added, noting South Korea's antitrust watchdog would examine the matter.
Kakao shares plunged more than 9 per cent on Monday to their lowest since May 2020, while shares in Kakao affiliates KakaoPay and KakaoBank also plunged more than 8 per cent in morning trade.
More at: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business...mp-3010836
