Internal transactions within family-owned conglomerates, or chaebol, remained active last year despite criticism that companies profit unfairly by awarding lucrative contracts to their subsidiaries.

On Tuesday the Fair Trade Commission announced the results of a survey on internal transactions for two-thousand-700 affiliates of 88 publicly listed business groups for 2023.

It showed that the proportion of internal transactions across both domestic and foreign affiliates stood at 32-point-five percent, totaling more than 704 trillion won, or over 503 billion U.S. dollars.

Among them, the proportion of internal trading between domestic affiliates, which significantly impacts the South Korean stock markets, stood at 12-point-eight percent, marking an increase of zero-point-six percentage point from the previous year.

For business groups where the controlling family holds more than 50 percent of the shares, the proportion of internal trading among domestic affiliates stood at 17-point-one percent, as compared with just 12-point-seven percent for companies with less than 20 percent family control.