Samsung to recruit 5,500 graduates amid crisis

Samsung Group, South Korea's largest conglomerate, Wednesday announced plans to hire 5,500 college graduates this year despite the global economic downturn.

The company originally planned to recruit 4,000 full-time employees this year, compared with 7,500 last year.

"But this was revised upward to 5,500 in order to give greater opportunities to recent college graduates," it said in a statement, adding its affiliates would also recruit 2,000 interns.

But the conglomerate has not set a group-wide investment plan for 2009 due to concerns about the deepening global crisis.

In the final quarter of last year Samsung Electronics, the group's flagship business, reported its first-ever quarterly loss, which it said amounted to 20 billion won (13.8 million dollars).

For the full year the world's largest memory chip maker saw its net profit drop 25 percent from a year ago to 5.53 trillion won.

The country's unemployment rate stood at 3.6 percent in January, compared to 3.3 percent a month earlier, despite a government drive to save jobs by expanding fiscal and tax incentives to companies.