Five of six listed K-pop labels grew in 2025. The biggest one lost ₩254bn

Six listed Korean music companies filed 2025 annual accounts. Five sold more than the year before. Four made more money. And the largest one, which is worth more than the other five put together, reported a net loss of ₩254.4bn — eighty-five times the small loss it recorded a year earlier.

Those two facts sit in the same industry, in the same year.

The table

Consolidated filings for fiscal 2025, in trillions of won. Market capitalisation is the trading day 8 September 2026. The same figures, with the gap between operating and net profit set out company by company, are on our listed label accounts page.

Read down the revenue columns and the year looks straightforwardly good. Five of six grew, and the four largest grew between 17.5% and 49.4%.

Read across HYBE’s row and it does not.

What HYBE’s own filing says

Revenue ₩2,650bn, up from ₩2,256bn — a rise of 17.5%.

Operating profit ₩49bn, down from ₩184bn — a fall of 73.2%.

Net profit −₩254bn, against −₩3bn the year before.

That is a company selling more, earning much less on what it sells, and finishing far below the line. The filing gives those three numbers. It does not give a reason, and we are not going to invent one — the gap between an operating profit of ₩49bn and a net loss of ₩254bn is roughly ₩300bn of items below the operating line, and naming what they were would take reading the notes, which is a different piece of work than this one.

Meanwhile the second, third and fourth tiers had good years

SM Entertainment grew revenue 18.7% and more than doubled operating profit, from ₩87bn to ₩183bn. Net profit went from ₩1bn to ₩359bn — a jump so large that it, too, is mostly happening below the operating line rather than in the business of selling records and concerts.

JYP Entertainment is the cleanest row in the table: revenue up 36.6%, operating profit up 21.0%, net profit up from ₩98bn to ₩161bn. Every line moved the same direction.

YG Entertainment turned an operating loss of ₩21bn into an operating profit of ₩71bn, on revenue up 49.4% — the largest revenue increase of the six.

And the two small ones did not

Cube Entertainment is the only company here whose revenue fell, by 15.0%, and it went from an operating profit of ₩12bn to an operating loss of ₩7bn.

FNC Entertainment grew revenue 18.7% and still lost money on both lines, as it did the year before.

Together the two of them are ₩0.12tn of market value against HYBE’s ₩7.82tn. In an industry discussed as though it were one thing, the distance between the top and the bottom of the listed set is about sixty-five to one.

Why there is no PER column

The obvious next column would be a price-earnings ratio. We are not printing one, for two separate reasons.

For HYBE the reason is arithmetic: net profit is negative, so the ratio is either negative or not defined at all. A negative PER is not a small PER — it is not a PER. We leave it out rather than print a number that looks comparable and is not.

For the four profitable companies the reason is dates. The market capitalisation above is one trading day, 8 September 2026. The profit figures are the twelve months to December 2025. Those are months apart, and a ratio built across that gap is a trailing annual figure, not a current one. It can be computed — the inputs are all in the table — but it should be computed by someone who knows they are doing that, which is why we publish the inputs and the dates instead of the quotient.

The same rule runs through our Korea valuation tape, where 929 of the 2,499 listed Korean companies with a readable annual filing reported net profit of zero or less. Loss-making is not an entertainment-industry condition. It is a third of the listed market.

What is unmeasured

CJ E&M sits in our company list and has neither a 2025 filing nor a market capitalisation in the datasets we hold. It is not counted as zero and it is not quietly dropped: it is named here as unmeasured, and the six above are what we can actually see.

Method

Every figure comes from the company’s own consolidated annual filing for fiscal 2025, retrieved through the DART open API run by Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service, with the filing receipt number held alongside each row. Both year columns come from the same filing, so the comparison is the company’s own. Market capitalisation comes from the Korean government public data portal daily price dataset (15094808), which is marked as carrying no usage restriction.

Nothing here is a forecast, a target, or a view on any share. This is not investment advice.