SEOUL, Nov. 4 (Xinhua) -- South Koreans' online direct purchase from Japan tumbled in the third quarter amid the ongoing campaign to boycott Japanese products, statistical office data showed Monday.
South Korean consumers directly purchased 47.2 billion won (40.7 million U.S. dollars) worth of Japanese products in the cyberspace during the July-September quarter, according to the Statistics Korea.
It was down 25.9 percent from the previous quarter. Compared with a year earlier, it was up 2.3 percent in the third quarter, after surging 32.0 percent in the second quarter.
The double-digit fall came amid the no-buy campaign here toward Japanese products, caused by Japan's tightened control in July over its export to South Korea of three materials, vital to produce memory chips and display panels.
In August, Japan dropped South Korea off its whitelist of trusted trading partners that are given preferential export procedure. In response, Seoul removed Tokyo from its whitelist of trusted export partners.
Japan's export curbs came in an apparent protest against the South Korean top court's ruling that ordered some of Japanese companies to pay reparation to the South Korean victims who were forced into heavy labor without pay during the 1910-1945 Japanese colonization of the Korean Peninsula.
Meanwhile, the online direct purchase from overseas totaled 842 billion won (726.2 million U.S. dollars) in the third quarter, up 21.0 percent from a year earlier.
