After more than 100 visits to North Korea, Rowan Beard had come to expect long waits for a taxi under the Kim Jong Un regime. But on a recent visit to Pyongyang—his first in years—a vehicle arrived within minutes.
His North Korean interpreter had whipped out a smartphone, opened an app called “Samhung” and hailed a ride with a service akin to Uber. The two tracked the taxi’s movements in real-time.
“This was all totally new,” said Beard, an Australian tour operator. “My mind was blown.”
North Korea is the world’s most unlikely growth story. Its economy is flourishing in ways not seen in years, aided by arms sales and troop deployments to Russia, supplies and financing from China, and the ability to flout international sanctions to import more energy, components and materials. Chinese leader Xi Jinping plans to visit North Korea this week for his first foreign trip of the year.
The Kim regime slammed its borders shut during the Covid-19 pandemic. It has since reopened to only a select few outsiders, including Russian and Western travelers and diplomats. Those visitors describe a North Korea unrecognizable from the past, especially its capital, Pyongyang, where Kim and the country’s elite live.
Restaurants there serve up brick-oven pizza and chicken wings. Diners can pay through a mobile QR-code system. Chinese electric vehicles whiz through the streets. Pyongyang has new pet stores, an internet-gaming cafe and car dealerships selling BMWs.
Kim has initiated a nationwide construction boom. Last year, North Korea built 10,000 new homes in Pyongyang—more than either Los Angeles or Chicago.
During the twice-a-decade Workers’ Party congress in February, the 42-year-old dictator championed the economic turnaround, saying in a speech it had come about despite the “barbaric blockade” of U.S.-led economic sanctions. On display outside the building were seven rows of rocket launchers fresh off the factory floor.
“Everything has fundamentally changed,” Kim said.
In 2017, in response to North Korea’s nuclear advancement, the U.S. and United Nations tightened economic sanctions on the nation with sweeping resolutions to restrict trade and financial transactions. The Trump administration has repeatedly stated its desire for the complete denuclearization of North Korea.
During his first term, President Trump met with Kim three times—becoming the first sitting American leader to do so—but the two failed to strike a deal that curbed Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Since taking office again, Trump has touted his relationship with Kim and has offered to meet again.
Kim, for his part, has urged North Koreans to focus on building a self-reliant economy. The regime doesn’t release official economic data, tightly controls information and orchestrates what visitors can see.
Outside the capital city, North Korea remains poor, with nearly half of its 26 million residents malnourished, according to a U.N. report. Its yearly gross domestic product is less than 1% of the U.S. total. The country is one of the world’s worst violators of human rights, where distributing a South Korean drama can be punishable by death.
South Korean think tank reports, with titles like “Sanctions Don’t Show in Satellite Imagery,” point to evidence that North Korea’s claimed economic progress isn’t mere propaganda. Vessel activity has surged at North Korea’s oil-storage facilities, which are being expanded. Many parking lots are more packed. North Korea now shines roughly three times as bright at night as it did five years ago, according to another report.
Beard, the Australian tour operator, hadn’t visited since before the pandemic. On his recent trip, he asked to have dinner at Pyongyang’s best restaurant. He and four others were taken to a skybridge connecting two high-rise apartment complexes. The restaurant, more than 100 feet above Pyongyang’s streets, had glass floors. Their meal consisted of traditional Korean cold noodles, sushi, pizza and drinks.
“The bill only came down to $150,” he recalled.
Foreign friends
North Korea didn’t turn around its economy by itself. The Kim regime fortified its energy supply and access to construction materials by sending munitions and more than 15,000 troops to the Russian front lines in the Ukraine war. About one-third of those soldiers were killed or injured. The arms sales have netted Pyongyang billions of dollars, according to estimates by the Institute for National Security Strategy, or INSS, a Seoul-based think tank affiliated with South Korea’s spy agency.
Monthly trade with China just hit an eight-year high, with a variety of Chinese consumer brands touting business in North Korea despite such sales violating sanctions. The proliferation of tech gadgets, which have ushered in a North Korean digital economy, relies heavily on Chinese components.
Many of Kim’s army of cyber thieves live in China, where they can more freely connect to the internet and operate without fear of arrest by outside authorities. Raids of cryptoexchanges alone have generated billions of dollars in funds for the regime, according to nations and cybersecurity groups monitoring Pyongyang’s activities.
Both Beijing and Moscow, which have veto power at the U.N., have reiterated their calls to relax sanctions on Pyongyang. Kim is expanding his network of potential friends, attending a Chinese military parade for the first time last fall, along with more than two dozen other foreign leaders.
In March, he hosted Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko in Pyongyang, where the two nations signed a friendship treaty. “We need each other,” Lukashenko said.
Kim’s nuclear program thus far has proven to be a deterrent against military attacks or attempts to forcibly unseat him from power, enabling him to shift his focus to the economy. The economic progress dims hope for a nuclear deal with the U.S., since Washington has often dangled sanctions relief or economic incentives to get Pyongyang to freeze, halt or relinquish its nuclear program.
North Korea’s economy expanded 3.7% in 2024, its fastest rate in eight years, according to the most recent figures from South Korea’s central bank, which uses spy-agency data to produce its estimate. South Korean think tanks estimate the growth has continued.
North Korea’s economic standing is the strongest since Kim assumed power nearly 15 years ago, and likely exceeds any point during the tenure of his father, Kim Jong Il, who ruled from 1994 until his 2011 death, said Stephan Haggard, of the University of California, San Diego, a researcher of North Korea’s economy for decades. “This is an incredible accomplishment for a country that is this poor,” said Haggard, noting that Kim benefited from some luck, too.
George Devedlaka, a British content creator, seized one of the rare opportunities for Westerners to enter North Korea when he signed up to run a 10-K in April 2025 in conjunction with the Pyongyang International Marathon. During his run, he said, he was taken aback by sights such as a North Korean raising a poodle’s paw to wave at runners. Many North Koreans, he said, were recording the runners with smartphones. “They were on their phones a lot,” he said.
Domestic production of cellphones hits half a million devices a year, according to Russian tour agency Vostok Intur. Smartphones are now so widespread in North Korea, researchers said, that more than 50 different brands exist.
‘Wealthier than ever’
Just five years ago, North Korea, and seemingly Kim himself, appeared to be on the ropes. Fear of Covid triggered border closures that caused a plunge in trade with China, North Korea’s main benefactor. Energy shortages caused coal mines to halt production. Basic food items such as vegetable oil and sugar became scarce on store shelves, Moscow’s then ambassador to Pyongyang told Russian state media in 2021.
Kim made a rare admission that the country’s economic policies had failed, acknowledging widespread food shortages and shedding tears in public. He lost considerable weight. “Almost all sectors fell a long way short,” he said in early 2021.
The economic slump began to reverse after Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which North Korea publicly endorsed.
More than a year into the war, North Korea became a munitions supplier to Moscow, generating more than $10 billion from the summer of 2023 to the end of last year, according to INSS, the think tank—a big boost to an economy with an estimated GDP of about $27 billion.
In 2023, Kim made his first overseas trip after Covid, to Russia’s Far East to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin. The following year, Putin visited Pyongyang, where the two leaders signed a mutual defense pact.
That set the legal framework for North Korea’s troop deployment to fight alongside Russia, which brought in more than half a billion dollars, according to INSS. Most payments will come in the form of sensitive military technology, weapons parts or other materials, the think tank estimates.
North Korea’s new warships and drones resemble Russian designs, weapons experts say. Moscow has already sent air defenses to Pyongyang, according to South Korean officials.
The deeper relationship with Russia is the biggest gain North Korea could have wanted, especially the “free advertising” afforded to the Kim regime’s weapons and fighters active on the Ukraine war battlefields, said Jung H. Pak, who was a senior official handling North Korean issues during the Biden administration. “The regime is wealthier than ever,” she said.
Russian military know-how has enabled Kim to shift more resources to bread-and-butter areas. North Korea’s pre-Covid economy had increasingly centered on black markets selling goods smuggled from China or under-the-table local goods—and with it the rise of a “donju” merchant class who made their wealth outside state control.
Kim has asserted more centralized control during the rebound years, demanding state-manufactured goods appear on shelves and expanding market surveillance.
Over the past year, North Korea has completed major construction projects that had stalled for years, including Pyongyang’s largest hospital, a greenhouse complex bigger than New York’s Central Park and a new beach-resort compound. His marquee “20×10” initiative—new factories in 20 cities and counties a year for the next 10 years—calls for local economic revitalization requiring a modern healthcare facility, light-industry factories and a leisure complex.
The regime is expanding state-run shops and pharmacies to replace black market activity, and new factories in rural areas are producing state jobs for traders who previously engaged in smuggling, said Lee Sang-yong, a researcher who has a network of sources inside the Kim regime.
“Some of the funds that the Kim regime made through selling weapons and hacking are trickling down to the residents,” said Lee, who heads a data-research center owned by DailyNK, an online publication.
Ben Weston, who runs a YouTube channel about North Korea, visited a special economic zone near the China and Russia borders last year. Far from Pyongyang, Weston spotted a new fleet of taxis, plus modern buildings replacing older houses. “These projects seemed to be happening all over the country,” he said.
Fancy cars
Austrian filmmaker Brigitte Weich hadn’t visited North Korea since 2018 before arriving at the Pyongyang International Film Festival last fall. The first thing she noticed was busier streets. Electric vehicles and imported cars were abundant, she said, and more locals appeared to own cars.
“The cars look quite fancy,” Weich said. Her North Korean tour guide said EVs were preferred because they were better for the environment.
Driving is now so widespread that state-run television recently aired a two-part segment about updates to traffic laws. Among the revisions: new bans on jaywalking, walking pets without a leash and smoking while driving.
In April, Kim toured a new neighborhood of residential skyscrapers in the “Hwasong” district, which shares a name with North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. A pair of 40-story residential towers was painted red to resemble missiles. Earlier this year, families of North Korean soldiers killed in Russia were given apartments in the district.
Chinese exchange students have provided glimpses on social media of life in Pyongyang, including photos of department stores featuring cosmetics with Chanel’s logo and sunglasses with Ray-Ban’s.
In May, North Korea held its first full-scale Spring International Trade Fair since the pandemic. More than 290 companies attended, including ones from Russia, China, Mongolia, Switzerland and Thailand.
A North Korean electronics company showcased “intelligent TVs” that enabled viewers to purchase goods. Smartphones, some costing more than $500, were exhibited in red, blue and orange.
“We are listening to the people’s demands,” a saleswoman told North Korea’s state broadcaster. “To further advance our domestic electronic goods.”
Zoe Stephens, a British citizen, has led groups to North Korea as a tour guide. Before the pandemic, she recalled, all payments were in cash. Visiting Pyongyang last year, she saw more locals buying with their smartphones. There are apps to order food, basic staples, even prescription medications.
“They were using delivery services, cash-payment apps you can pay through your phone,” she said.
Write to Dasl Yoon at dasl.yoon@wsj.com and Timothy W. Martin at Timothy.Martin@wsj.com
