Platform Trading Businesses Break 20%...Wholesale and retail sales drop after 10 years

With the spread of online consumption, the proportion of businesses doing business with digital platforms has exceeded 20%.

According to the results of last year's service industry survey released by Statistics Korea, the proportion of businesses doing business with digital platforms stood at 20.9%, up 1.7 percentage points from a year ago.

Retail had the largest number of 281,000 and food and pubs had 166,000.

The proportion of businesses that introduced unmanned payment devices rose 0.4 percentage point to 6% of the total, while 8.7% of the food and liquor businesses used unmanned payment devices, which was higher than other industries.

The wholesale and retail business saw its sales turn negative for the first time in 10 years since 2013, with sales falling mainly in the general wholesale business of products such as metal manufacturing and general trading companies.