How to Research a Korean Company in English: DART, KIND, and What the Translation Leaves Out
More of Korea's corporate filings are in English than a year ago
The practical objection to buying individual Korean stocks was never really access or cost. It was that you could not read the company. Filings were in Korean, earnings materials were in Korean, and the disclosures that actually move a stock arrived in Korean first and in English — if at all — whenever someone got around to it.
That has been changing in stages. From January 2024, KOSPI-listed companies with more than ₩10 trillion in assets were required to file key disclosures in English: 111 companies, 26 categories of material information. On May 1, 2026, the requirement entered its second phase. The threshold dropped to ₩2 trillion in assets, expanding coverage to roughly 265 companies, and the scope widened from 26 items to the full set of disclosures the exchange requires — 55 material information items, plus fair disclosure and inquired disclosure.
Timing tightened too. The largest companies, those above ₩10 trillion, are expected to file the English version the same day as the Korean one. Companies newly captured at the ₩2 trillion threshold have three days.
One limit worth knowing up front: this is a KOSPI rule. KOSDAQ companies are not covered by the mandate, though regulators have signaled they are considering extending it to large-cap KOSDAQ names. Many KOSDAQ companies file in English anyway — voluntarily.
Read the disclaimer before you trust the translation
Open the Financial Supervisory Service's English DART site and the first thing on the page, above the search box, is a warning. The FSS states that it neither affirms nor certifies the accuracy of the English disclosures posted there, that English disclosures "are made voluntarily with no legal effect and may not correspond to the original disclosures in Korean due to mistranslation," and that users are advised to refer to the original Korean filings for specific details.
That is not boilerplate you can skim past. It defines what you are actually reading. The Korean filing is the legal document. The English version is a convenience copy, and where the two diverge, the Korean one is what binds the company and what a regulator or court would look at.
In practice this matters most at the margins that matter most: conditional language in a contract disclosure, the precise scope of a buyback, the difference between a board resolving to consider something and a board approving it. If a single sentence is load-bearing for your investment case, that is exactly the sentence to check against the Korean original — with a machine translation of the Korean text, if necessary, rather than relying on the official English rendering alone.
DART and KIND are not the same system
Korea splits corporate disclosure across two platforms, which trips up investors arriving from a market where EDGAR is the single front door.
DART, run by the Financial Supervisory Service, is the statutory filing repository — annual and quarterly reports, audit matters, securities issuance, large-shareholding reports. It is the closest analogue to EDGAR, and its English edition sits at englishdart.fss.or.kr. KIND, run by the Korea Exchange, carries exchange-level disclosures: the material-information announcements, fair disclosures and responses to exchange inquiries that make up the day-to-day flow of company news. The English disclosure mandate described above is an exchange rule, so KIND is where its effects show up most directly.
For most research, start on English DART and treat KIND as the second stop when you are chasing a specific announcement. The two systems overlap enough that a filing you cannot find on one is often on the other.
A workflow that works on the English site
English DART's integrated search lets you filter by filing type, and the category names are the map of what exists. The ones worth knowing:
Periodic Disclosure holds the annual and quarterly reports — the closest thing to a 10-K and 10-Q, and where you go for segment detail, capex and related-party transactions. Report on Major Issues is the material-event stream: capital increases, buybacks, large supply contracts, litigation. Equity Disclosure and the site's dedicated 5%·Executive view cover large-shareholding reports and executive holdings — who is accumulating and who is selling. External Audit Matters is where auditor changes and opinions surface, which is often the earliest public sign of trouble at a smaller company. Issuance Disclosure covers new securities, including the convertible bonds that dilute KOSDAQ shareholders more often than they expect.
There is also a live feed: Today's Disclosure, refreshed every thirty seconds and split by market — KOSPI, KOSDAQ, KONEX and others. On an ordinary afternoon it runs to dozens of filings across the market, and scanning it is the fastest way to see what a Korean trading day actually consisted of, rather than reading about it second-hand a day later.
For numbers specifically, the XBRL Financial Statements section gives you structured financial data rather than a PDF you have to read around — the practical route if you want to compare several companies on the same line items without trusting a translation of each one.
What is still missing, and how to work around it
Four gaps survive the 2026 expansion, and knowing them saves you from concluding that information does not exist when it simply is not translated.
The first is size. Below ₩2 trillion in assets — which is most of KOSDAQ and a long tail of KOSPI — English filing is voluntary. Coverage of small caps is patchy and inconsistent from one company to the next.
The second is depth. A mandate covers specified disclosure items, not every page a company produces. Footnotes, the fuller management discussion, and much of the detail an analyst actually wants often remain Korean-only even at companies that comply fully.
The third is timing. Same-day filing applies to the largest companies; three days is the standard for the newly covered tier. Three days is a long time in a stock that just announced a contract, and Korean-reading investors will have acted first.
The fourth is translation quality. Regulators have been expanding machine translation and improving it with AI, which raises coverage and lowers precision at the same time. Treat a fluent English disclosure as a good summary and a poor contract.
The workaround for all four is the same and unglamorous: use English DART to find out that a filing exists and roughly what it says, then put the Korean original through a translation tool when the specifics carry weight. Company IR pages are worth checking separately — large Korean companies increasingly publish English earnings decks and hold English calls that are more informative than any filing.
Two things to internalize before your first filing
Which document is the real one
Photo: 2H Media / Unsplash
The hierarchy is simple once stated, and almost nobody states it. The Korean filing is the legal instrument. The English filing is a translation offered for convenience, and the regulator hosting it explicitly declines to certify that it is correct.
This does not make English filings useless — it makes them a first pass. Use them to learn that something happened, to follow a company's ordinary flow of news, and to screen. Do not use them as the sole basis for a decision that turns on the exact wording of one clause, because that is precisely where a translation is most likely to be thin and where the disclaimer is pointed.
| Korean filing | The legal document — binding |
| English filing | Convenience translation — no legal effect |
| Where they can diverge | Conditions, scope, timing language |
| Safe use of English | Screening, following news flow, first pass |
| Check the Korean when | One clause carries your thesis |
Coverage expanded, but only so far
Photo: ETA+ / Unsplash
The May 2026 phase more than doubled the number of KOSPI companies required to file in English, and widened the requirement from a short list of key items to the exchange's full disclosure set. That is a real change in what a non-Korean-reading investor can follow without help.
It is also bounded in a specific way. The rule follows company size, not company interest — a ₩1.5 trillion KOSDAQ company in the middle of the AI supply chain may be far more relevant to your portfolio than a ₩3 trillion KOSPI utility, and only the utility is covered. Below the threshold, English filing depends entirely on whether the company chooses to bother.
The takeaway
Researching a Korean company in English is no longer a workaround, but it is not yet the same experience as researching a U.S. one. The May 2026 expansion took mandatory English disclosure from 111 companies to 265 and from 26 items to the exchange's full set, which covers most of what a foreign investor in large-cap Korea actually needs to follow.
What has not changed is the hierarchy. English is the convenience copy; Korean is the document. English DART says so on its own front page, and the sensible reading of that warning is not to distrust the English filings but to know what they are for — finding out what happened, not adjudicating exactly what was promised.
Start at englishdart.fss.or.kr, use KIND for exchange announcements, check the company's own IR page for English earnings materials, and go back to the Korean original whenever a single sentence is doing the work in your investment case. This guide describes the systems as of September 2026; disclosure rules in Korea have changed twice in three years and are likely to keep moving.
Featured photo: Justin Morgan / Unsplash
The Korea investing series
Nine guides, in the order they build on each other.
- 01Getting accessHow foreigners can now buy Korean stocks directly
- 02Converting currencyThe FX math behind a won-denominated position
- 03Choosing a boardWhat KOSPI vs. KOSDAQ actually tells you
- 04What it costsTaxes, transaction levies and the fees in between
- 05When you can tradeHours, price limits and the halts that stop them
- 06Doing the research — you are hereReading Korean filings in English on DART and KIND
- 07Reading the labelWhy MSCI still calls Korea an emerging market
- 08Knowing the exitsThe delisting rules that now catch small KOSDAQ names
- 09Passing it onWhat Korea taxes when a non-resident dies owning shares