Trump reaches trade agreement with South Korea

Seoul – President Trump announced Wednesday that the United States had concluded a trade agreement with South Korea, which is now faced with a 15% rate on its exports.

Under the agreement, South Korea will invest $ 350 billion in the main American industries and buy $ 100 billion in its liquefied natural gas, Trump wrote on social networks on Wednesday. He added that new investments would be announced when the South Korean president Lee Jae Myung would go to Washington in the next two weeks.

The new rate is a significant reduction compared to the 25% that Trump had announced via a letter earlier this month, but always a blow for the long-standing free trade regime which had, for years, maintained the tasks on the goods of one or the other country close to zero. Trump has long decreased this arrangement as unfair in the United States, which recorded a trade deficit of $ 66 billion with South Korea last year.

“We note that the negotiations that have occurred in many countries since April are very different from the principles of the WTO or the ALE,” said Kim Yong-Beom, a senior political official of the Presidential Bureau of South Korea, during a press conference on Thursday. “It’s regrettable.”

Kim said that the South Korean negotiators had pressure for a rate of 12.5% on cars – one of the most important exports in the country to the United States – but that they had been postponed, with a Trump company on its position that “everyone obtains 15%”.

US and South Korean officials seem to interpret the agreement – whose details are still rare – in different ways.

New export cars on a car carrier trailer arrive in a port in Pyeongtaek, South Korea on April 15, 2025.

(Lee Jin-Man / Associated Press)

The appellant a “historic trade agreement”, the secretary of trade Howard Lutnick wrote on social networks that “90% of the profits” of the investment of $ 350 billion in South Korea would go “to the American people”, an assertion which immediately raised eyebrows in South Korea.

Trump said something similar about the $ 550 billion investment package included in the trade agreement concluded with Japan at the beginning of the month. Japanese officials, on the other hand, said that the profits would be divided proportionally, depending on the amount of the contribution and the risk on each side.

At the press conference, Kim said Seoul worked by assuming that 90% of the profits will be “reinvested” – not unilaterally claimed. He added that the specific terms must still be arranged on a “project” basis.

“In a normal civilized country, which would be able to accept that we are investing money while the United States takes 90% of the profits?” He asked.

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has supervised the investment of $ 350 billion as a boost for South Korean, semiconductor and energy construction companies trying to make breakthroughs on the American markets.

“This agreement is the meeting of the United States’s interest to rekindle manufacturing and our intention to make South Korea companies more competitive on the American market,” he said in an article on social networks on Thursday. “I hope this will strengthen industrial cooperation between South Korea and the United States as well as our military alliance.”

While Trump also said that “South Korea will be completely open to trade with the United States and that it will accept American products, including cars and trucks, agriculture, etc.”, Kim said that agriculture was not part of the agreement and that no concession on American rice or beef – two main points of conflict between Seoul and Washington – was not granted.

South Korea, which is the best world importer in American beef, currently prohibits the beef of cattle that have more than 30 months on concerns.

Given its status as a basic culture and a critical source of farmers’ livelihoods, rice is one of the few agricultural goods strongly protected by the South Korean government. Seoul currently imposes a 5% rate on American rice up to 132,304 tonnes and 513% for excess.

“We were able to successfully defend a large part of our positions in these areas,” said Kim.