Organizers of next month's world swimming championships in South Korea are facing the prospect of half-filled grandstands, figures showed Friday, with only around one-third of tickets sold.

A total of 419,000 tickets are available for the FINA World Championships taking place in the southern cities of Gwangju and Yeosu, from July 12-28. But only about 149,000 have been taken up since they went on sale in January, organizers said Friday, just over 35 percent.

Around 140,000 of those were block-bought by companies, municipal governments and state-owned firms, meaning that private individuals had bought merely 9,000 or so, about 2 percent of those available.

"Not many would travel all the way to Gwangju to see water sports in the summer," one of the organizers acknowledged to Agence France-Presse (AFP).