South Korea's top 30 business groups plan to raise their investments in 2011 to record high, a local industry lobby group said on Monday.
The nation's top 30 conglomerates are planning to expand this year's investments by 12.2 percent to a record 113.2 trillion won (101 billion U.S. dollar), according to reports released by the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI).
The heads of the country's 30 largest companies, including Samsung Group's chairman Lee Kun-hee and Hyundai Motor Group's Chung Mong-koo, said in a meeting with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in Seoul earlier in the day that they plan to raise the number of employment to 118,000 this year from 107,000 last year.
"South Korean companies are planning to make aggressive investments this year at a time when the global economy has not entered into a complete recovery phase yet, so they can dominate global market shares in advance before the world economy recovers fully," an FKI official said.