The commercial won rate with the time it was taken, a two-way converter and a table in thousands, which is how Korean prices are written.
We could not load the stored rate. Use the refresh button or type a rate below to convert.
Most people who convert won in Brazil are not planning a trip. They are buying something Korean: an album or a photobook, a concert ticket, cosmetics, a preorder on a Korean shop that prices in won. Korean cultural exports arrived here at scale over the last decade and brought an unfamiliar currency with them, one where every price has four or five digits and looks alarming until it is converted. Twenty thousand won reads like a fortune and is not. Travel is a smaller share of this audience, though a growing one.
The won belongs to an economy that lives on selling semiconductors, cars, ships and batteries abroad, and it trades accordingly: it weakens when global demand for technology cools and recovers when it returns, moving with the world cycle far more than with anything in Brazil. Its defining event is still the Asian crisis of 1997, when the won lost half its value in months and the country took an emergency programme from the IMF — remembered in Korea simply as the IMF crisis, and marked by a campaign in which ordinary people handed in their gold to help repay it. One consequence lasts: Korea keeps tight control over trading of its currency abroad, and the won is barely traded outside Korean hours.
That is part of why it is so seldom found in a Brazilian bureau de change. The won is a low-liquidity currency here: most exchange houses do not hold the banknotes at all, and those that do quote a spread far above what they charge on dollars or euros. Travellers commonly take dollars and change them on arrival, or withdraw won from an ATM in Korea, where cards are accepted almost everywhere. For an online purchase what applies is your card operator rate plus its spread and IOF, not the figure above. The value at the top is the commercial rate, refreshed every half hour with the exact moment of the quote next to it — a reference to measure an offer against, not the price you will pay.
From the market feed for the won against the real, stored here by a job that runs every 30 minutes; the date and time of the quote are printed under the value. The refresh button fetches the current one live from your browser. Korean trading hours barely overlap with the Brazilian afternoon, so outside them the number holds at the last close.
No. Your card operator converts at the rate it applies on the day the purchase is processed, and adds its spread and the IOF for international purchases. Use the number here as a yardstick: convert the price in won, compare with what was charged, and the difference is what the conversion cost you.
Usually not, or not easily: most bureaus here do not stock it, and where they do the spread is much wider than on the main currencies. The common routes are exchanging dollars in Korea or withdrawing from an ATM there.
Because one won is worth a fraction of a centavo and converting it produces zeros. Korean prices are written in thousands and tens of thousands — a coffee is a few thousand won, a meal ten or fifteen thousand — so the steps follow the amounts people actually type.
Mostly things outside Korea: global demand for semiconductors, the dollar, and Bank of Korea decisions against those of the Federal Reserve. That is where to look when the number moves, not a prediction of where it goes.
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