K Culture WireKorean pop culture, in numbers

HYBE, SM, JYP and YG: market value per artist we can count

Name: HYBE, SM, JYP and YG: market value per artist we can count
Creator: K Culture Wire

Our markets desk measured the market value of every listed K-pop company from Korea Exchange prices on 8 September 2026. We measured how many of each company’s artists we can actually count. Divide one by the other and you get a figure nobody publishes — market value per artist we can count.

This is not a valuation, and it is not advice. Dividing one number by another does not say a company is expensive or cheap. It says what the arithmetic gives.

And the divisor is a floor. We count an artist only when Wikidata records a record label for them — 1,044 of the 9,249 people we hold, or 11.3%. A floor in the divisor makes every figure here a ceiling. The real per-artist value is lower for every company, by an amount we cannot measure.

That is why the table is not sorted by it. The spread from 6.6 to 831.9 is 126x — and part of that 126x is simply that we know some companies’ rosters better than others. Read each row on its own, not against the row above it.

Every company we could join

Ordered by market value, largest first — not by the per-artist figure. All 6 were matched by ticker, not by name: company names vary (“HYBE” against “Hybe”) and a ticker does not.

Company	Ticker	Market value (100M KRW)	Artists we can count	Per artist (100M KRW)	Of those, with a reader count
Hybe	352820	78,195.8	94	831.9	35
SM Entertainment	041510	18,933.9	133	142.4	55
JYP Entertainment	035900	14,053.1	72	195.2	33
YG Entertainment	122870	8,121.3	109	74.5	57
Cube Entertainment	182360	949.8	38	25.0	25
FNC Entertainment	173940	317.1	48	6.6	32

Companies we could not join

These appear in our artist data but not in the market data. We leave them in rather than drop them — a missing row is a fact about our reach, not about the company.

Company	Ticker on Wikidata	Artists we can count
CJ ENM Entertainment Division	130960	69
Kakao Entertainment	—	67
DSP Media	—	46

One of them carries a ticker on Wikidata that no longer trades. Our markets desk checked the exchange’s own daily price list and the corporate filing system, and found the code in neither. A ticker recorded on Wikidata is not proof that a company is listed — Wikidata keeps codes that used to trade, and we had passed that code along as if it were live before the second check caught it.

What this does not say

It is not advice and not a valuation. No part of this page says what a share is worth or what anyone should do.
Every per-artist figure is a ceiling. The divisor counts only artists with a label recorded on Wikidata, so the true figure is lower everywhere — by different amounts.
The companies are not comparable on this measure. A company whose roster we know well will look cheaper per artist than one we know poorly, with no difference in the business.
A record label is not a management contract. Wikidata records the label that released the music, which in Korea usually but not always matches the agency.
Market value moves daily. These prices are one day’s close (8 September 2026), measured by us, not a running figure.

Market data: Korea Public Data Portal — Stock Price Information (dataset 15094808, Financial Services Commission; no usage restriction) · artist data: Wikidata (CC0). How the artist counts were built →

What we wrote from this data

Five of six listed K-pop labels grew in 2025. The biggest one lost ₩254bn
HYBE sold 17.5% more than the year before and still reported a net loss 85 times larger. SM, JYP and YG all grew revenue and profit. Filed figures, in English, with the filing receipts named.
10 September 2026