Meanwhile, foreign investors’ share of South Korean stock holdings jumped from less than 5% in the mid-1990s to about 40% in the early 2000s. While many long regarded low dividend payments as one reason for “Korea discounts” in company valuations, leading firms such as Samsung are now adopting U.S. practices by paying out about 40% of their net profits to shareholders. And in 2017, Samsung started to pay dividends every quarter rather than annually - a big change, given that annual dividends were once seen as a virtue of East Asian capitalism over Anglo-Saxon short-termism.īut East Asian capitalism now needs re-balancing.
