People paid most attention to Chong Kun Dang among the top 10 local pharmaceutical firms during the Covid-19 outbreak from February to May, industry data showed.

The Global Bigdata Research, a private research institute, on Wednesday released a report that analyzed big data of the 10 drug companies on 12 communication channels, including media sites, online communities, blogs, internet cafes, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Kakao Story, Naver’s Knowledge iN, businesses sites and government agencies.

The institute picked the 10 companies based on the first-quarter earnings, excluding two well-known biotech firms Celltrion and Samsung BioLogics. The analysis was made on the big data generated in about 100 days from Feb. 18 when the Covid-19 infections rapidly increased from the 31st confirmed patient to May 27.

Chong Kun Dang topped the level of people’s attention with 120,939 pieces of online information, creating a significant gap from Yuhan Corp. with 35,859.

Daewoong Pharmaceutical ranked third with 30,982, followed by GC Pharma with 30,863, Hanmi Pharmaceutical with 26,181, Ildong Pharmaceutical with 16,479, Kwangdong Pharmaceutical with 16,173, Dong-A ST with 11,262, Boryung Pharmaceutical with 10,990, and Jeil Pharmaceutical with 8,324.

The institute also analyzed the online interaction between the media and consumers over how much they liked 10 companies.

It classified postings with words such as “pretty, good, satisfied, best, laugh, doing well” as positive, and those with words, including “bad, angry, dissatisfied, cry, irritable, doing badly” as negative.

The result showed that Chong Kun Dang took the No. 1 position with a 55.41 percent positive rate. It also ranked first with a 44.06 percent “net rate of being liked,” calculated by the positive rate minus the negative rate.

GC Pharma came second in the net rate of being favored and had the lowest 8.75 percent negative rate among the 10 firms.