Three Korean institutions – Hana Bank, the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA), and the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation (K-SURE) – have signed a memorandum of understanding to channel financial and insurance support to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and mid-sized companies pursuing overseas markets. The signing took place at KOTRA headquarters in Seocho-gu, Seoul, and establishes a structured public-private framework meant to ease the path for Korean exporters operating under external economic pressure, according to Seoul Economic Daily.
According to The Asia Business Daily’s report, companies enrolled in KOTRA’s Overseas Branch Establishment Program stand to receive a bundle of financial concessions from Hana Bank. These include preferential financing under an “Export Package Preferred Financing” product tied to guarantee instruments, coverage of short-term export insurance premiums through a group insurance arrangement, and favourable treatment on foreign exchange commissions and rates.
On the credit guarantee side, Hana Bank will absorb guarantee fees entirely for a participating company’s first year and will raise the annual ceiling on export credit guarantee fee support from 20 million won to 50 million won. K-SURE will offer credit guarantee limits at up to double the standard level for companies in KOTRA-backed programs – a provision aimed at addressing two recurring constraints for exporters: the risk of unpaid receivables and the difficulty of maintaining adequate working capital.
KOTRA will survey demand for financial support among program participants and work with the other two parties to identify companies that may qualify but have not yet enrolled. Lee Jonghyun, executive director of Hana Bank’s Foreign Exchange Division, said the bank would “continue to provide practical financial support to strengthen the global competitiveness of Korean export companies based on public-private cooperation.”
The agreement arrives against a backdrop of record Korean SME trade figures. The Ministry of SMEs and Startups (MSS) reported that SME overseas shipments totalled US$118.6 billion in 2025 – a 6.9% increase from the previous year and the highest annual figure on record. The number of firms involved in exporting reached 98,219, also a new high, representing a 2.5% rise from 2024. Export momentum built through the year. Growth in the first half was incremental, but the second half saw shipments climb 10.8%, with each of the second, third, and fourth quarters setting new quarterly records. New exporters increased in number, as did firms that maintained exporting activity, while the count of companies that exited export markets declined.
Automobiles and cosmetics were the two categories that moved the headline numbers most. SME automobile exports rose 76.3%, while cosmetics climbed 21.5% to reach US$8.3 billion – distributed across 204 countries. Electronics-related goods, including semiconductor manufacturing equipment, also advanced. One structural feature of the SME export base is its product diversity. The top 10 SME export categories accounted for 36.1% of total SME shipments, compared with 60.9% for Korea’s aggregate national exports. That broader spread across product lines means SME export volumes are less exposed to a downturn in any single commodity or sector – a characteristic that carries relevance for trade credit underwriters assessing portfolio concentration risk.
China returned as the top destination market after three years of declining SME exports there, with consumer goods – particularly cosmetics and apparel – seeing a lift partly attributed to demand generated on Chinese social media platforms. The US held the second position. Despite ongoing tariff uncertainty, SME exports to the US remained broadly flat, with record cosmetics and electrical equipment shipments offsetting a decline in steel. The Middle East posted a 14.1% regional increase, and the CIS region rose 37.3%, driven largely by consumer goods.
SME online exports crossed US$1.1 billion in 2025, up 6.3% from the prior year. SMEs generated 75.6% of Korea’s total online export value, and the number of SMEs conducting e-commerce exports grew to 4,392. The growth in digital trade channels introduces underwriting considerations that differ from those in conventional export transactions. Cross-border e-commerce often involves buyers with limited credit histories, markets where payment enforcement is uneven, and transaction volumes too small to warrant individual policy review.
Short-term group export insurance – the type K-SURE is supplying under the new MOU – is designed to aggregate this kind of risk across a pool of exporters, spreading exposure and reducing the per-company cost of coverage. The inclusion of export insurance premium support in the Hana Bank-KOTRA-K-SURE package reflects the extent to which trade credit protection has become a standard component of SME export finance programs in Korea, rather than an optional add-on.
