A long awaited pick-up in South Korea's private consumption may not happen until well into next year as indebted consumers remain reluctant to spend and healthy exports are failing to ignite local demand, economists said.

Exports in recent months have been more than 30 percent higher than a year earlier, but companies have also appeared to favour making shareholders happy by returning hundreds of millions of dollars by buying back and retiring their own shares instead of buying more machines or hiring more workers.

Copyright Reuters, 2004