Last year, the sales of the top five conglomerates accounted for 40% of the gross domestic product (GDP). When expanded to the entire group of large corporations, their sales were analyzed to be nearing 80% of the scale of the South Korean economy.
According to Yonhap News Agency on the 6th, the Fair Trade Commission recently designated 92 publicly listed corporate groups (hereinafter referred to as large corporations with assets of 5 trillion won or more), which collectively recorded sales of 2,077 trillion won last year.
This amounts to 78.8% of the nominal GDP (2,549 trillion won) announced by the Bank of Korea last year.
Of these, 46 companies classified as 'top large corporations,' which are interlocking investment-restricted groups (with assets of 11.6 trillion won or more), recorded sales of 1,833 trillion won, accounting for 71.9% of the GDP.
Interlocking investment-restricted groups account for the top 50% of large corporations by asset standards and constituted 91.3% of the sales. This indicates that the concentration of top firms among large corporations is overwhelming.
Corporate sales also include overseas revenues, so they do not completely align with GDP categories. However, considering that they represent the output for a specific period, they can serve as a measure of the degree of concentration among large corporations.
The sales of Samsung Group, the largest in the business community, amounted to 331.8 trillion won last year based on Fair Trade Commission standards. This means that Samsung Group's sales accounted for 13.0% of the South Korean GDP.
Next were Hyundai Motor Group (279.8 trillion won, 11.0%) and SK (205.9 trillion won, 8.1%).
The sales of the top five groups, including Samsung, SK, Hyundai Motor, LG, and Lotte, reached 1,025 trillion won, which accounted for about 40% of last year's South Korean economic output.
The proportion of sales from large corporate groups to GDP decreased gradually from 70.9% in 2018 to 68.7% in 2019 and 65.3% in 2020.
Then, following the COVID-19 pandemic, the situation changed. The sales of large corporations with high crisis response capabilities surged, causing this ratio to jump to 73.5% in 2021 and 85.2% in 2022.