![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/news-p.v1.20260703.71b01c73c1ce489b89ef48360017794d_P1.jpg\"\/ "\\"Homeplus")
A customer enters a Homeplus store in Seoul on the 3rd, the day the Seoul Bankruptcy Court decided to terminate Homeplus’s corporate rehabilitation proceedings (court receivership). Reporter Cho Tae-hyung<\/p>\nA customer enters a Homeplus store in Seoul on the 3rd, the day the Seoul Bankruptcy Court decided to terminate Homeplus’s corporate rehabilitation proceedings (court receivership). Reporter Cho Tae-hyung<\/p>\n
Homeplus will enter bankruptcy proceedings if it fails to raise 200 billion won within two weeks and does not file an immediate appeal.<\/p>\n
With the Seoul Bankruptcy Court deciding Tuesday to terminate the rehabilitation process, Homeplus is likely to face a bankruptcy filing this month unless it files an immediate appeal. The court will declare bankruptcy after reviewing the causes and appoint a bankruptcy trustee. The trustee will sell assets such as stores and inventory before distributing proceeds to creditors according to legal priority. Estate claims, including wages, severance pay and tax claims, are repaid first.<\/p>\n
However, some point out that the trustee’s role will be limited, as Homeplus’s 62 company-owned stores are held as trust collateral by Meritz Financial Group, the largest creditor. Meritz is expected to separately execute collateral rights, including the sale of the stores.<\/p>\n
If Homeplus goes bankrupt, damage is expected to spread widely, affecting directly and indirectly employed workers, tenant store owners, suppliers and commercial paper investors. Homeplus directly employs about 12,000 workers, with June wages unpaid and 33.5 billion won in overdue wages. All of these workers, along with 1,000 indirectly employed personnel handling parking, cart management and cleaning at the hypermarkets, will become unemployed.<\/p>\n
Workers at 4,603 supply partners that provide goods such as fresh food or services to Homeplus will also be affected. About 47% of Homeplus’s partners are known to depend on Homeplus for more than half of their sales. According to a recent survey by the Korea Federation of SMEs, 150 small and medium-sized businesses supplying Homeplus were owed an average of 774 million won in unpaid supply payments.<\/p>\n
Tenant businesses have also lost their operating base as customers have dried up, and the prospects for recovering their deposits are uncertain. This is because general commercial claims rank low in legal priority. Commercial paper victims, who rank as subordinated creditors, are also unlikely to recover damages amounting to 401.9 billion won.<\/p>\n
A lawyer at a major law firm explained, “As time passes, estate claims increase, so in many cases there is almost no money left for final repayment, making it nearly impossible to repay general claims.” The lawyer added, “It may end without even fully repaying the estate claims.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A customer enters a Homeplus store in Seoul on the 3rd, the day the Seoul Bankruptcy Court decided…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[39884,5778,39882,8877,8210,112,9527,39883,39885],"class_list":["post-73499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-seoul","tag-commercial-paper","tag-homeplus","tag-homeplus-bankruptcy","tag-korea-retail","tag-meritz-financial-group","tag-seoul","tag-seoul-bankruptcy-court","tag-supply-partners","tag-unpaid-wages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}