SEJONG: South Korean builders saw their sales rise 9.9 percent last year from a year earlier amid a boom in the local housing market, government data showed Monday.

Construction firms logged a combined 392 trillion won (US$346 billion) in sales in 2017, compared with 357 trillion won in 2016, according to the data compiled by Statistics Korea.

Domestic sales jumped 13.1 percent on-year to 354 trillion won in 2017, while overseas revenue dipped 12.6 percent to 38 trillion won.

The annual data also showed that the number of builders doing business in South Korea jumped 4.1 percent on-year to 72,376 in 2017, with the number of employees reaching 1.67 million.

The average sales of each builder checked reached 5.42 billion won in 2017, up 5.6 percent from a year earlier.