Predicting financial distress of the South Korean manufacturing industries

► This paper analyzed the yearly financial data of manufacturing corporations collected by the KODIT. ► We developed a financial distress prediction model based on radial basis function SVM. ► We compare the classification accuracy performance between our RSVM and AI techniques. ► The experiments demonstrate that RSVM always outperforms other models in the performance of financial distress predicting. ► This enhancement in predictability of future financial distress can significantly contribute to the correct valuation of a company.