Happy new year! There is something about the first post of a new year that makes me want to review the year just gone or try something new. This month, we will do both by reviewing the performance of the stocks of the ‘Big Four’ South Korean music labels (i.e., HYBE, JYP Entertainment, SM Entertainment, and YG Entertainment) and speculating about how that relates to the year 2025 in review for K-Pop and the K-Wave more generally.
Using the convenient function for acquiring financial data from the R package quantmod, we can get the opening, high, low, and closing prices (in KRW) of shares in each of the Big Four music labels as they are listed on the Korea Exchange. Although this data is provided day-by-day, that is, the opening, high, low, and closing prices for each trading day of 2025, for ease of navigation and to provide a higher level summary we instead group the prices by week here.
One interesting point to note from the ticker symbols for these companies used to acquire the data is that they are not all listed in the same market division of the Korea Exchange. Equity in JYP Entertainment, SM Entertainment, and YG Entertainment are all traded on the KOSDAQ (Korea Securities Dealers Automated Quotations), which is the secondary or junior board which focuses primarily on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), venture companies, and growth-oriented businesses, with a strong tilt towards tech. Equity in HYBE, however, is traded on the KOSPI (Korea Composite Stock Price Index), the main or senior board for large, established companies. This gives us some initial indication of the relative size, value, and significance, both domestic and international, of these companies. While the KOSDAQ is far from insignificant for supplying capital for SMEs and as an economic barometer, it is the KOSPI that acts as South Korea’s primary stock market index and, as such, the aggregated performance of companies listed there is taken as a key indicator of the state of the broader South Korean economy.
Opening, high, low, and closing (OHLC) values are fairly core financial data. There are even a couple of specific ways to visualise them. Here, we go with the OHLC bar chart. This relies on ticks to either side of a bar/line to represent opening and closing prices, on the left and right of the bar/line respectively, while the length of the bar/line represents the range between the high and low of the specified time period, weeks in our case.
While quantmod offers its own native style of OHLC visualisation, as last month we turn to higcharter, the rather wonderful R wrapper for Highcharts. This offers a high degree of interactivity, should you want to zoom in on shorter time periods, a handy navigator at the bottom of the chart, and a tooltip on hover to give you precise, week-by-week OHLC figures for each company at the close of each trading week over 2025.
Overall it looks like 2025 was a good year for the Big Four. An important caveat to bear in mind, though, is that 2024 was absolutely not. That is, while the stocks of each company all closed the year at a higher value than they opened, where they opened for 2025 was not historically high, so 2025 can be though of as something of a rebound.
Other than the general upward trajectory over the course of the year, it is also possible to discern a certain ‘bounciness’ to the chart, most especially for HYBE. Even with 20/20 hindsight and applying a certain amount of forceful post hoc rationalisation, trying to tie these to developments in the K-Wave or artists’ activities seems like quite a stretch. To take just a few examples, the real possibility of a BTS reunion prompted by the end of the final member’s military service in June did not appear to spike HYBE stocks. Neither did the start of BLACKPINK’s Deadline World Tour in July spark any similar magic for YG Entertainment, nor, indeed, the release of K-Pop Demon Hunters in June for JYP Entertainment, the soundtrack of which features the JYP-signed artists TWICE. Much as some of these may have contributed to the earnings of their respective labels, they do not obviously seem to have fed through contemporaneously into share price.
On the more business end of things, while it is possible to speculate that the Chinese company Tencent buying a sizeable share of SM Entertainment from HYBE in May, may have generally buoyed the former company’s performance over the middle of the year, neither that event itself, nor the rumours of possible expansion into the Chinese market (supplemented by speculative talk of a loosening on the quasi-official restriction of South Korean cultural products there) seems to have led to dramatic movement in valuation.
Although it cannot be confirmed with absolute certainty, the fact that the periods with the most noticeable short-term upward trajectories in the chart coincide with the release of quarterly financial reports and earnings calls is highly suggestive that it is the bottom line, rather than anything more meaningful to fans, which plays the largest role in dictating the value of shares in these companies.
While all notionally part of the Big Four, the difference between the value of HYBE shares and the others is stark. To illustrate this, we note that the annual high for its nearest rival, SM Entertainment, was KRW 152,500 over the week ending 4 July 2025, whereas the low for HYBE over the entire year was KRW 190,00 during the week ending 3 January 2025.
Also striking is the length of the bars/lines visible for HYBE. This indicates substantial volatility in share price. For example, in the trading week ending 31 October 2025, the price opened at KRW 285,500 and closed at KRW 341,000 only to open at KRW 350,500 the following week, and lose just under 13% of its value, ultimately closing at KRW 305,500 on 7 November 2025. By way of comparison with that KRW 65,000 fluctuation in value over those two weeks, over the entire year, the value of JYP Entertainment shares fluctuated by only KRW 31,900 with a high of KRW 88,500 during the week ending 7 November 2025 and low of KRW 56,600 during the week ending 11 April 2025.
From the observations and interpretation above, we can take away a few key points. First, from the KOSPI listing of HYBE, even though it is a relatively young company, we can infer the importance of the contribution of the K-Wave to the South Korean economy. Considering the timing of fluctuations in share price, though, moderates our understanding of the influence of the K-Wave on the valuation of individual businesses. We further note that fan discourse is not restricted to K-Pop artists, but extends to their labels and the music industry in South Korea more broadly. In such discourse, conjectures that commercial outcomes for labels are attributable to the activities, real or potential, of artists are easy to find. Our retrospective examination of share price movement over 2025, however, does not appear to support this.
While the increase in share price across the Big Four over 2025 may be attributed to a rebound, there is not yet cause to believe that it was a bounce and that 2026 will be characterised by some kind of financial return to earth. Particularly promising news for all of these companies is the positive statements on deepening (perhaps resuming?) cultural exchange between China and South Korea made following a summit between South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung and China’s leader Xi Jinping on 5 January 2026 (reported by the BBC here). This would represent (greater?) access to an enormous potential market. What’s more, albeit specific to HYBE, as this piece was being written, the 2026 release of a BTS album entitled Arirang was announced. It is now only a matter of watching and waiting to see how or whether these circumstances, or changes in performance arising from them, are reflected in the valuation of the Big Four over the rest of the year.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean
Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean
Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies
(AKS-2021-OLU-2250004)