South Korea's listed firms saw their financial health worsen in the first quarter of the year amid the economic slowdown.
Recent data from Korea Exchange shows... the average debt-to-equity ratio of 6-hundred-40 companies listed on the main KOSPI bourse was around 1-hundred-11 percent as of the end of March.
That is up around 6 percentage points from the end of 2018.
Their total debt came to around 1-point-14 trillion U.S. dollars,... up 7-point-5 percent from three months earlier,... but their combined equity only went up around 1-point-3 percent, leading to a higher debt-to-equity ratio.
