KOSPI
28 companies
Amorepacific Corporation
Cosmetics & Beauty
Amorepacific sells K-Beauty cosmetics like male peacocks display tail feathers - costly signals of health and status. Sulwhasoo and Laneige products p...
Asiana Airlines
Airlines
Asiana's routes trace migratory corridors across the Pacific—seasonal patterns refined over decades, energy-efficient flight paths, stopover hubs for...
CJ CheilJedang
Food & Biotechnology
Korean food-biotech hybrid fermenting amino acids and food ingredients—lysine, nucleotides, seasonings produced through microbial cultivation. Industr...
CJ Corporation
Conglomerate
Korean conglomerate spanning food, biotech, logistics, entertainment—specialized divisions cooperating like Portuguese man-of-war polyps. CJ CheilJeda...
Coupang, Inc.
E-commerce
Coupang built its third logistics center in Taiwan in 2024—before the market became profitable—because ecosystem engineering requires infrastructure f...
Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering
Shipbuilding
Daewoo builds vessels like coral polyps secreting calcium carbonate shells - slow accretion of steel plates welded into hulls large enough to carry ci...
Doosan Corporation
Trading & Investment
Doosan manufactures heavy equipment across Korean conglomerate. Its excavators, turbines, and desalination plants serve infrastructure projects global...
Doosan Enerbility
Power Equipment
Doosan Enerbility builds power generation equipment. Its gas turbines and boilers convert fuel to electricity, massive machinery that spins generators...
E-Mart
Retail
South Korean retail giant competing with e-commerce—hypermarket format blending grocery and general merchandise like omnivorous feeding strategies. Ph...
Hyundai Motor
Automotive
Hyundai Motor is South Korea's largest automotive manufacturer, producing vehicles from sedans to SUVs and rapidly expanding its electric vehicle line...
Kakao Corporation
Internet & Technology
KakaoTalk reached 48.9 million monthly active users in Q3 2024—97% of South Korea's internet users—creating network effects so dominant that the platf...
Kia Corporation
Automotive
Kia crossed KRW 100 trillion in annual revenue for the first time in 2024 (KRW 107.45 trillion, $77.5 billion), achieving an 11.8% operating profit ma...
Korea Investment Holdings
Financial Services
Operates financial services across securities, asset management, and banking like an organism distributing metabolic functions across specialized orga...
Korean Air Lines Co., Ltd.
Aviation
Connects global destinations through hub-and-spoke networks that mirror how neurons route signals through synaptic junctions. Their Incheon hub concen...
KT Corporation
Telecommunications
Functions as South Korea's nervous system - fiber optics like axons firing 5G signals at millisecond speeds. Smart cities respond to traffic, energy,...
LG Chem
Chemicals
LG Chem executed the rarest corporate maneuver in 2020: surgical amputation of its most valuable limb. The company spun off LG Energy Solution—its bat...
LG Display
Display Technology
Pioneered OLED screens that emit light through organic molecules, mimicking how fireflies generate bioluminescence. Their displays achieve pixel-level...
LG Electronics
Consumer Electronics
LG Electronics achieved something most conglomerates fail at: growing platform revenue 75% year-over-year in 2024 while maintaining hardware dominance...
LG Energy Solution
Energy Storage & Batteries
LG Energy Solution is a global leader in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, energy storage systems, and consumer electronics, partnering wit...
LG Household & Health Care
Consumer Goods
Markets consumer health and beauty products through brand ecosystems that occupy distinct market positions like species partition resources. Their por...
LG Uplus
Telecommunications
Operates telecommunications networks that route data packets like ant colonies direct foragers through pheromone trails. Their infrastructure dynamica...
Lotte Corporation
Conglomerate & Retail
Lotte is a major conglomerate with businesses spanning retail, food, entertainment, chemicals, and hospitality across Korea and Japan. The company ope...
Naver Corporation
Internet & Technology
Naver crossed KRW 10 trillion in annual revenue in 2024 (KRW 10.7377 trillion, $7.7 billion)—the first Korean internet platform to reach that mileston...
POSCO Holdings
Steel & Materials
POSCO Holdings is one of the world's leading steel manufacturers, expanding into clean energy materials including lithium, nickel, and hydrogen to sup...
POSCO Holdings Inc.
Steel & Materials
POSCO Holdings recorded KRW 1.3 trillion in impairment losses in 2024—deliberately writing down steel assets to fund KRW 2.6 trillion in battery mater...
Samsung Electronics
Technology/Electronics
Samsung Electronics is one of the world's largest technology companies, headquartered in Suwon, South Korea. The company exemplifies sophisticated mod...
Samsung SDI
Battery Manufacturing
Samsung SDI recorded operating losses through Q1-Q3 2025 while committing $3.5 billion to a General Motors joint venture in Indiana (36 GWh annual cap...
SK Hynix
Semiconductors
SK Hynix is one of the world's leading memory semiconductor manufacturers, specializing in DRAM and NAND flash memory chips for computers, servers, mo...