How to verify a Korean company

Verifying a Korean company is not difficult, but it is confusing from the outside, because there is no single place to look. Four different institutions hold four different pieces of the answer, and almost every one of them publishes in Korean only.

This guide sets out which registry answers which question, so you can go straight to the one that matters instead of working through all four. If you only want to confirm a company exists and is still trading, that is the first section and it takes about thirty seconds.

Start by deciding what you actually need to know

“Is this company real” is four separate questions, and people usually only need one or two of them answered.

1. Existence and trading status — the National Tax Service

Every business in Korea has a ten-digit registration number, the 사업자등록번호. The National Tax Service publishes, for any such number, whether the business is actively trading, temporarily suspended (휴업), or permanently closed (폐업), along with its VAT category.

This is the single most valuable check, and the one people skip. It catches the company that closed eight months ago and is still emailing quotations. The official channel is NTS Hometax, which has no English interface for this lookup — which is why this site exists. You can check a registration number in English here; it queries the same National Tax Service data.

Understanding what comes back matters as much as running it. The guide to 휴업 and 폐업 explains what each status means commercially, and the structure of the number itself lets you spot an invalid one before you even query it.

2. Directors and capital — the court registry

Incorporated companies are registered with the Supreme Court, and the record is held in the Internet Registry Office, usually called IROS. The document you want is the corporate registry extract, the 법인등기부등본. It shows the legal name, the registered address, the paid-in capital, the directors, and the company’s history of changes.

Two practical notes. IROS charges a small fee per document and is in Korean. And it is keyed on the thirteen-digit corporate registration number (법인등록번호), not the ten-digit tax number on invoices — these are two different numbers, and confusing them is the most common reason a search returns nothing.

3. Financial position — regulator filings

Larger corporations file summary financial statements that are published as open data: revenue, operating profit, assets, liabilities and the debt ratio. This is what tells you whether a supplier can fund your order rather than merely exist.

You can look these up on the financials page using the thirteen-digit corporate number. Most smaller Korean companies file nothing at all, so an empty result is normal and is not a warning sign. What the figures mean, and which of them actually predict delivery risk, is covered in reading a Korean supplier’s financial statements.

4. Market disclosures — DART

DART is the Financial Supervisory Service’s disclosure system, and it is excellent — for the companies it covers. That means listed companies and large filers. If you are dealing with a mid-sized manufacturer, and most buyers are, DART will have nothing on them. Do not read that absence as a red flag; it is the normal case.

What none of these registries prove

This is where verification most often goes wrong. Every check above confirms something about a legal entity. None of them confirm anything about the person emailing you.

• Registration does not mean the company is solvent. A business can be actively registered and unable to pay its own suppliers.
• Registration does not mean you are talking to that company. Anyone can copy a genuine registration number into an email signature. This is the most common Korean-supplier fraud pattern by a wide margin.
• Registration does not mean the company does what it claims. A trading company presenting itself as a factory is registered perfectly legitimately.
• The English name means nothing legally. Korean companies register under a Hangul name; the English version is a convention, as the guide on English names explains.

Closing that gap is a different exercise from a registry lookup — it means confirming that the bank account, the domain and the documents all belong to the entity whose number you checked. The fastest version of that is in is this Korean company legitimate, and the full pre-payment sequence is in verifying a Korean supplier.

If you only do one thing

Take the registration number from the document the company sent you — not from its website, and not retyped by hand — and check its status. If it comes back closed or suspended, nothing else you were about to do matters. If it comes back trading, you have ruled out the cheapest and most common failure and can move on to the harder questions.