DART Disclosures: How to Read Korean Corporate Filings in English
What DART is
DART (Data Analysis, Retrieval and Transfer System) is the Financial Supervisory Service's electronic disclosure system — Korea's rough equivalent of the U.S. SEC's EDGAR. Every Korean-listed company (and many large unlisted companies subject to external audit requirements) files periodic and event-driven disclosures through DART, and filings are publicly viewable free of charge.
Main filing types you'll encounter
- Periodic reports: annual (사업보고서), semi-annual, and quarterly business reports, roughly analogous to a 10-K/10-Q, including audited financial statements.
- Material/ad-hoc disclosures (수시공시): event-driven filings — M&A, large contracts, capital changes (rights offerings, bonus issues, capital reductions), litigation, management changes, and more.
- Major shareholder / large-holding reports: ownership disclosures once an investor crosses reporting thresholds, plus insider (executives, major shareholders) trading reports.
The language reality
The overwhelming majority of DART filings are in Korean only. Large, internationally cross-listed companies sometimes furnish English summaries or investor-relations translations voluntarily, but there is no general requirement for English filings. This is one of the clearest instances of the "Naver-walled-garden" gap this site is built around: the primary source exists and is free, but it is not in English.
A practical reading approach
Machine translation of DART filings has improved substantially and is a reasonable starting point for a first pass, but Korean accounting and legal terminology does not always translate cleanly (see this site's glossary for common terms). For anything decision-relevant, cross-check key figures against the structured XBRL/financial-statement data DART exposes, rather than relying solely on machine-translated narrative text.
Programmatic access: OpenDART
The FSS also operates OpenDART, a free API (registration required, English documentation available) that lets developers pull filing metadata, financial statement data, and disclosure documents programmatically instead of scraping the DART web UI.
Frequently asked questions
- Are DART filings available in English?
- Mostly no. The large majority of filings are Korean-only. Some large, internationally cross-listed companies voluntarily publish English IR summaries, but there is no general English filing requirement.
- What is OpenDART?
- A free, registration-based API from the Financial Supervisory Service that provides programmatic access to DART filing metadata and financial statement data, documented in English as well as Korean.