Nestle, Kookmin Bank and Adidas are among the companies to recently add space, the report said.

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Talk about rear-view navigating: Allowed the acquisition, Kookmin could be a regional champion.

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Meantime, another Asian cover story in 2002, on the Carlyle Group's regional ambitions, zeroed in on its makeover of KorAm Bank, a Kookmin rival.

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"They cannot do much because they face a choice between bad and even worse, " said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea specialist at Kookmin University in Seoul.

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The growing demand for Chinese consumer goods is no longer confined to the political elite, according to Andrei Lankov, a leading expert on North Korea at Kookmin University in Seoul.

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Kookmin Bank in South Korea tries to encourage such efforts by charging a lower rate of interest for borrowers that meet certain corporate-governance criteria, such as having independent board directors.

ECONOMIST: But in Asia they will take time to build

The employees of Kookmin, one of the country's largest banks, took even more drastic measures this week when they heard that their bank was talking about merging with Housing and Commercial Bank.

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By this measure, it is bigger than Singapore's DBS Group and Korea's Kookmin Bank, and has attracted big stakeholders such as the Temasek fund of Singapore (it has 7.6%) and CLSA and Merrill Lynch funds.

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By this measure, it is bigger than Singapore's DBS Group and Korea's Kookmin Bank (nyse: KB - news - people ), and has attracted big stakeholders such as the Temasek fund of Singapore (it has 7.6%) and CLSA and Merrill Lynch (nyse: MER - news - people ) funds.

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