The Korean Wave (Hallyu) refers to the global popularity of South Korea’s cultural economy exporting pop culture, entertainment, music, TV dramas and movies.
The Korean Wave has never been bigger, and it has never been harder to define. The Korea Foundation, the Korean government’s public diplomacy agency, counted about 225 million Hallyu fans in 119 countries at the end of 2023. In March 2026 the animated film “KPop Demon Hunters”, the most-watched film in the history of Netflix, won two Academy Awards, and BTS returned after a break of almost four years with an album named after the Korean folk song “Arirang”. Yet the film was made by a Hollywood studio for an American platform, and the BTS comeback concert in central Seoul was streamed to the world by that same platform. Hallyu has become a global industry, and two questions are now open: how much of it Korea owns, and what still makes it Korean.
The lesson of three decades is that the state set the stage, and founders and family-controlled business groups built the business. Korea lifted censorship after it became a democracy, and successive governments invested in digital infrastructure and supported the cultural industries with funding and promotion abroad. The dramas, films and songs that travelled were made and largely financed by broadcasters, founder-led agencies and family-controlled groups such as CJ, and no ministry planned the individual hits. The distinction matters to any country or company that hopes to repeat Korea’s success, and to Korea itself as the wave approaches its fourth decade.
Hallyu is a Chinese term which, when translated, literally means “Korean Wave”. The expression came into use in Chinese-language media in the late 1990s, and “Hallyu” is its Korean pronunciation. Korea’s culture ministry used it in 1999 as the title of a compilation of Korean pop songs. The Oxford English Dictionary added the word in 2021. It is a collective term used to refer to the phenomenal growth of Korean culture and popular culture encompassing everything from music, movies, drama to online games and Korean cuisine just to name a few. During then US president Barack Obama’s visit to Korea in March 2012, he made reference to the Korean Wave in a speech to students in Seoul. By then, successive Korean governments had made cultural exports a national priority.
South Korea is one of the few countries in the world that have a dedicated goal to become a leading exporter of popular culture. It is a way for Korea to develop its “soft power”. Soft power is a popular term coined in 1990 by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye. It refers to the intangible power a country wields through its image, rather than through hard force. Hard force refers to military power or economic power. An example of soft power in play is how the US enticed the world to buy its Levi’s jeans, Apple iPhones, Marlboro cigarettes, Coca-Cola soft drinks and Hollywood movies, by leveraging on a desirable image. A unique image of cool. Korea ranked 11th in the Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index 2026, and President Lee Jae Myung, who took office on 4 June 2025, has pledged to make the country one of the world’s five leading soft powers.
Hallyu first spread to China and Japan, later to Southeast Asia and several countries worldwide where it continues to have a strong impact. From October 1998, Korea lifted in stages its ban of more than 50 years on Japanese popular culture, which improved cultural exchange between the two countries and supported the surge of Korean popular culture among the Japanese. South Korea’s broadcast authorities have been sending delegates to promote their TV programmes and cultural content in several countries.
Hallyu has been a blessing for Korea, its businesses, culture and country image. Since early 1999, Hallyu has become one of the biggest cultural phenomena across Asia. The Hallyu effect has been tremendous. In 2004 it earned Korea an estimated USD 1.87 billion in foreign currency, equal to about 0.2% of GDP. In 2019, Hallyu had an estimated USD 12.3 billion boost on the Korean economy, measured by the exports it generated. The comparable estimate for 2025 is about USD 19 billion.
Over the last six decades, South Korea has become very rich and very futuristic. In 1965, Korea’s GDP per capita was less than that of Ghana. In 2025, South Korea was the world’s 13th largest economy.
The popular media in the region has attributed the origins of Hallyu to a couple of movies and TV dramas that were released from 1999 onwards. “Swiri” (released internationally as “Shiri”), an inspiring movie about the North Korea/South Korea espionage released in 1999, gave Hallyu the public face as it became hugely successful in Korea and then in Japan. It was followed by a drama called “Autumn in My Heart” in 2000 that sustained the excitement created by “Swiri”. These were followed by “My Sassy Girl” in 2001 and “Winter Sonata” in 2002. Together, these titles became very popular not only in Korea but also in Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and Vietnam. The success of these entertainment products created a tremendous buzz about the exploding popularity of Korean culture. Regional media sources were quick enough to pick up the cues and collectively announce the birth of Hallyu.
Although this was the public face of Hallyu, the actual origins go back further in time. Many accounts date the wave to 1997, when China’s state broadcaster CCTV aired the Korean family drama “What Is Love” to a large audience. By February 2000, when the boy band H.O.T. sold out a concert in Beijing, Chinese newspapers were writing of a “Korean wave”. The conditions for both successes were created inside Korea in the decade before. Five main factors contributed tremendously to the evolution of the Korean wave:
Lifting the restrictions on foreign travel for local Koreans: Probably the most important factor which eventually made way for Hallyu was the Korean government’s decision in 1989 to fully liberalise foreign travel for Koreans. This made way for a number of Koreans to explore the western world, mainly the US and Europe. Many pursued their education in these countries and others started their careers in esteemed companies in Europe and the US before returning to Korea during the late 1990s. These western educated Koreans brought with them new perspectives of doing business, new subtleties and interpretations to art, cinema and music and innovative forms of expressions. This gave birth to an immense pool of fresh, young, and highly qualified talent waiting to explore opportunities within Korea.
Restructuring of Korean chaebols: Less than a decade after foreign travel was liberalised, Asia (and Korea) was going through the severe Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. The Asian financial crisis was a perfect storm of bad debt, panic among lenders and regional economic challenges. In December 1997, the Korean government agreed a rescue package of about USD 57 billion led by the IMF (International Monetary Fund), of which the IMF itself committed USD 21 billion. It ended up using only USD 19.5 billion of the IMF credit, and the loan was paid back in August 2001, three years prior to schedule. Korea had been a poor country a generation before the Asian financial crisis, and defeating poverty was something that the country had learnt the hard way. Therefore, all measures were used to pay back the loan and get back on track in record time.
The crisis left Korea with a serious image problem, as many global stakeholders still believed Korea was in bad shape, so the country faced global scepticism. To solve this, the incoming president Kim Dae-jung set out to win back the confidence of global investors, and during the crisis the presidential office hired an international public relations firm to promote Korea abroad.
One of the biggest consequences of the crisis within Korea was its effect on the Korean chaebols. Korean chaebols were highly diversified conglomerates which operated in literally every sector of the economy from chip to ship making. The Asian financial crisis forced these chaebols to restructure their business models by divesting many of their business units and concentrating on their core competencies. This in turn opened up the market internally and gave other smaller players an immense opportunity to venture into varied businesses. More entrepreneurs emerged from the crisis emboldened by the opportunities. Korea realised that it was dependent on the chaebols – if they failed, the country would fail. President Kim Dae-jung pushed for information technology and popular culture as the two key drivers for the future Korea. Technology would create new industries above the traditional manufacturing Korea has been dependent on since it rose out of poverty and industrialised, and popular culture could become an important export product worth billions of dollars – while it would help rebrand Korea.
The idea had been raised before the crisis. In 1994, an advisory report to President Kim Young-sam had pointed out that the Hollywood film “Jurassic Park” earned as much as the export of 1.5 million Korean cars. Kim Dae-jung’s government turned the idea into policy. It passed a basic law to promote the cultural industries in 1999 and increased the culture budget. It also set a principle that later governments have been judged against: the state supports culture and does not direct it.
Samsung is one of the most prominent Korean chaebols, and the implications of the 1997-98 crisis gave birth to an enhanced push for internationalisation by the company and its owners as they sought new growth outside Korea. Samsung and its rise since then have been a prominent example of how Korean firms have benefited from the global interest in what Korea is and what the country has to offer.
The crisis also shaped who would own the new cultural industries. Samsung, Daewoo and Hyundai, which had moved into film in the early 1990s, closed their film divisions after the crisis. CJ, a food group that had separated from Samsung in the 1990s, had entered the industry in 1995 with an investment in the new Hollywood studio DreamWorks SKG. It stayed, and it opened Korea’s first multiplex cinema in 1998.
In music, the founders were already at work. Lee Soo-man, who had watched the rise of MTV while studying in California in the early 1980s, set up SM Entertainment in 1995. By 1997 Yang Hyun-suk and Park Jin-young had founded the agencies that became YG Entertainment and JYP Entertainment. The three founders built the trainee system, in which an agency recruits teenagers and trains them for years in singing, dance and languages before their debut. It became the production model of K-pop.
Banning the censorship laws: The Korean censorship laws had prohibited movie makers and other artists from showcasing many topics considered controversial. This had curbed their creative independence for a long time. The change began with Korea’s move to democracy in 1987. In October 1996, the Korean Constitutional Court banned this censorship and opened up a barrage of topics for artists to explore. This move provided immense opportunities and independence to the young and vibrant generation of Korea to express newer and bolder ideas through cinema and music. The first Busan International Film Festival was held in the same year. Many influential film makers rose during this period, among them Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho.
Increased emphasis on branding by leading Korean companies: Some of the major chaebols of Korea like Samsung and LG had started their branding journey by the mid-1990s. At Samsung, the turning point was the “New Management” initiative of 1993, when chairman Lee Kun-hee told his executives to put quality before volume. There was an increased emphasis on quality, design and marketing and branding on a global scale. These skills were rubbed off to various other sectors of the economy as well. Collectively, there was an increased urge to improve overall quality to provide superior goods to the world market.
Increased focus on infrastructure: The Korean government has been and is spending significant funds to develop high-tech Internet infrastructure as it believes that every Korean citizen will benefit from being connected to the global world. By the early 2000s, Korea had the highest broadband penetration in the world. This gave its music, games and online comics an early digital home market. In addition to this, Korea is one of the few countries worldwide that invests its funds into the nation’s start-ups. In 2012, government funds constituted over 25 percent of all venture capital money disbursed in Korea. Venture capital firms planned to put almost a fifth of their new investment that year into cultural content.
All the above things occurred during more or less the same period in the 1990s. A potent talent base of young and energetic Koreans on one hand and a very conducive cultural environment in Korea backed up by operational excellence on the other, gave an excellent base for young Koreans to experiment with music, drama and movies. Movies with more controversial and never-before-tested topics were filmed, which gained popularity across the region. Family dramas with a common sensitivity and cultural background which appealed to a vast population of Asians also became very popular, increasing the overall craze for Korean entertainment products. Many young local singers and bands adapted the US rap music to suit the Korean taste and it emerged as a big rage, beginning with Seo Taiji and Boys in 1992. These entertainment products (music, movies and dramas) initiated the phenomenal growth of Hallyu.
Hallyu has consistently and exponentially grown since 1999, when it surfaced as a major cultural phenomenon. But the growth of this wave has not been totally spontaneous and unplanned. The five major factors discussed above shaped the cultural environment of Korea, which led to the birth of the Korean wave. In a similar fashion, the sustained growth and popularity of this wave has been well managed by all its chief stakeholders. What the stakeholders managed was the system around the hits rather than the hits themselves: the training of talent, the financing of production, the opening of new markets and the use of each success to prepare the next. No ministry planned “Winter Sonata”, “Gangnam Style” or BTS.
Five important factors have been crucial for maintaining the popularity of Hallyu and further boosting its potential to expand into other markets:
Growing popularity of Korean brands: The Korean brands are doing the exact same thing to Japanese brands now, what the Japanese brands did to US brands during the 1960s and 1970s. Samsung and LG have been the forerunners in creating world class brands in the consumer electronics industry. In the 2025 ranking by Interbrand of the world’s top 100 brands, Samsung was listed as the 5th brand in the world with brand value of USD 90.5 billion, Hyundai as the 30th and Kia as the 89th. LG has transformed itself from a manufacturer of cheap products to a brand of repute. Hyundai and Kia brands are creating a similar revolution in the car industry. Hyundai, which was once the source of jokes in the US industry due to its poor quality, is now touted as one of the best quality cars in the market and is competing head on with the Japanese giants Toyota and Nissan. Amorepacific is South Korea’s largest beauty company by sales and ranked 7th on the Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) list of the 100 largest global beauty companies in 2017. It ranked 17th in the list published in 2026.
On a collective level, the acceptance of these brands in the international market has improved the overall perception of its country of origin – South Korea. Gradually the world is associating Korea with Samsung and Hyundai instead of the Korean War. The government’s 2026 Overseas Hallyu Survey, which polls consumers of Korean content abroad, points the same way. K-pop was the first image that respondents associated with Korea for the ninth consecutive year, followed by Korean food. IT products and cars entered the top ten, and the Korean War and the North Korean nuclear issue no longer appeared in it. This new interest in Korea has been a great driver of Hallyu.
Increased R&D in design, production and overall quality: The popularity of leading Korean brands across the world including the US has highlighted certain key dimensions of success for Koreans – superior quality, cutting edge designs and a contemporary feel for the products and services. This lesson has been absorbed by almost all business sectors. This new emphasis has seen an increased investment in research and development in creating products of superior quality. The entertainment products like movies, music, dramas have all been described as having excellent production quality. South Korean movies now are of Hollywood production value and quality. This newfound focus on quality has enticed many new customers and helped sustain the popularity of movies, music, and dramas, which are the main products driving the Korean wave.
As the popularity of these movies, music and dramas increased manifold in the region, it has also resulted in increased creative output. From 1999 to the present, many Korean movies with innovative and appealing themes have been released.
As a result, Korean producers have been able to source capital for these movies from countries outside of Korea, like Japan. People in many markets like Singapore, China, Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong are being treated with more and more new movie numbers across the years. The fact that Parasite is the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars alongside 3 other Academy Awards is testament to the global recognition of the increasing quality and authenticity of Korean entertainment products.
In addition to movies, Korean pop music by Korean music bands has also skyrocketed across the last 20 years. One does not need to be a K-pop fan to have heard of groups like Big Bang, Super Junior, Girls’ Generation, BTS and Blackpink, or of the solo artist PSY. According to a report by the Korea Foundation, there were 89 million Hallyu fans in 113 countries in 2018. Out of these, over 70 million lived in Asia and Oceania, 11.8 million lived in the Americas and 6.6 million in Europe. By the end of 2023, the total had risen to about 225 million. This speaks volumes about the explosiveness and the way that Korean pop music has proliferated the globe in the last 20 years.
Even the Korean dramas have emerged as well packaged goods with a good measure of visual and emotional appeal. Many of the dramas have traditionally depicted exotic and serene coastal and rural areas, and the theme has been the underlying values of Asian audience – family melodrama with lots of emotions and innocent love. With growing popularity across the years, the dramas today explore a wider variety of themes, including tensions between traditional familial values and economic development. Many of these dramas have created records of sorts.
The historical drama Dae Jang Geum or “Jewel in the Palace” experienced extensive global commercial success in Asia and Oceania (Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Brunei, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan), Middle East and Africa, and even the Americas and Europe. An illustration of this success would be in Hong Kong, where it was the highest-rated acquired drama series on the broadcaster TVB in 2005, with an average audience of 2.9 million in a city of fewer than 7 million people.
The drama Winter Sonata became so hugely popular in Japan that its male lead Bae Yong-joon was renamed Yonsama, a name that carries a Japanese honorific of great respect. The “Descendants of the Sun” television series, aired in 2016, also enjoyed immense success across Asia, with more than 2.4 billion views on the Chinese streaming platform iQiyi during the 2 months it aired.
This increase in the quantity and quality of movies, music and dramas has helped sustain the growth of Hallyu.
Effective management of all touch points: Even though multiple factors have tremendously influenced the birth and evolution of Hallyu, one of its drivers is careful and effective management of all possible touch points. Touch points are the numerous instances where the customers come into contact with Hallyu. The entertainment industry, the different organisations involved in movies, music companies, online gaming companies, Korean chaebols and the Korean government have each managed their touch points with care, and their efforts have reinforced one another. Large events such as the 2002 FIFA World Cup and the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics and Winter Paralympics have also helped to build a more positive perception of Korea. All these players have ensured portrayal of the interesting aspects of Korean culture in their respective media. They have also effectively optimised the use of new Korean celebrities to further the cause of Hallyu across the region. The music agencies have also built touch points of their own. Fan platforms such as Weverse, built by HYBE, the agency behind BTS, combine an artist’s content, a fan community and a shop for merchandise, and give the agencies direct knowledge of their fans in each market.
Continuous support from the Korean government: Korea has a Ministry of Culture (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to be exact) that treats popular culture as an export industry. For many years a division of the ministry, the Popular Culture Industry Division, focused on Korean pop music, fashion, mass entertainment, comic books, cartoons, and other key products. In December 2025 the ministry created a Culture and Media Industry Office, which brings together its support for media, film, games, popular music and publishing. The ministry’s total budget for 2026 is more than USD 5 billion, with the aim to boost economic growth particularly through growing the country’s cultural export industry. Additionally, since 2006 the Korean government has sponsored investment funds earmarked to nurture and export popular culture, through a state fund of funds managed by the Korea Venture Investment Corporation. The funds announced in January 2026 amount to about USD 500 million, of which the government provides 60%. The remaining funds come from investment banks and private companies. Funds backed in this way supplied almost half of the production budget of the 2026 hit “The King’s Warden”.
One of the strategies of managing Hallyu is the careful study of its target audience – at first mostly people in Asian countries. The Korean government and its divisions follow these Asian countries and cultures closely to understand which Korean Wave products would have the best probability of success in different markets. The main instrument is the annual Overseas Hallyu Survey of the culture ministry and its agency, the Korea Foundation for International Cultural Exchange. Its 2026 edition, the 15th, questioned 27,400 consumers of Korean content in 30 markets.
The Korean government has also been very active in managing Hallyu outside of Korea by conducting different cultural festivals displaying the Korean offerings, conducting PR campaigns to publicise Korean uniqueness and indirectly helping the entertainment industry by creating a very conducive environment. As of 2026, the Korean Culture and Information Service has set up 35 Korean Cultural Centers in 30 countries across Africa, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Americas to promote Hallyu.
According to UNESCO, world exports of cultural goods and services reached USD 389.1 billion in 2019, twice the level of 2005, and the Korean government is eyeing a significant part of that pie moving forward. In her 2013 inaugural address, President Park Geun-hye made the “creative economy” a centrepiece of her government.
Support has continued since the late 1990s under governments of the left and the right, and each has added an instrument of its own, from an advisory committee on Hallyu policy in 2005 to the Presidential Council on Nation Branding in 2009. President Lee Jae Myung’s government has set the highest targets of any Korean government. In May 2026 the culture ministry raised the 2030 goal for cultural exports from USD 35 billion to USD 110 billion, after widening the definition to include Korean food, beauty and fashion and the spending of foreign visitors. On this wider definition, exports were about USD 72 billion in 2025. The government has also brought the industry into policymaking. Park Jin-young, the founder of JYP Entertainment, co-chairs the Presidential Committee on Popular Culture Exchange, which began work in October 2025.
The entertainment industry has been very proactive in feeling the pulse of the masses and producing appealing movies and dramas. The Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) has made the best use of this huge interest in Korea by offering very attractive tour packages to tourists. These packages involve trips to locations made famous by the Korean dramas, travel to exclusive shooting locations and so on.
The Korean government has also backed “K-Culture Valley” in Goyang, a Hallyu inspired theme park which would house everything from film studios, Korean restaurants, live music concerts to movie galleries, hotels, shopping malls selling Korean celebrity merchandise and even a Korean theme park at a planned cost of USD 1.2 billion. The purpose of this theme park has been to put in one place all the interesting components of Hallyu for visitors. The project has proved hard to deliver. It was launched in 2016 by Gyeonggi Province with the CJ group as developer. Construction of its concert arena stopped in 2023 with less than a fifth of the structure built, and the agreement with CJ was terminated in July 2024. In October 2025 the province named a consortium led by the concert promoter Live Nation as preferred bidder to complete the arena, and completion is planned for 2030.
Cultural proximity and rising demand across Asia: History, in a strange way, is positively aiding Korea and the growth of Hallyu. Korea was once a colony of Japan and thus is on the same page as many other Asian countries. As economies across Asia opened and grew in the 1990s, demand for popular culture rose quickly, especially among the young, and Korean dramas and music found a ready audience alongside local productions. The dramas dealt with family, respect for elders and the climb out of poverty in ways that many viewers across the region recognised. Japan became one of the largest markets for Korean cultural exports.
The Chinese are able to relate more closely with Korean cultural products, which draw on a shared Confucian heritage. This was a major factor for the explosion of Korean culture in mainland China until 2016.
For its first 15 years, Hallyu was largely an Asian phenomenon. Dramas travelled through broadcasters in Japan, China and Southeast Asia, and music through regional tours and album sales. Two changes in distribution carried it to the rest of the world: social media in the 2010s and global streaming platforms from 2016.
The first global breakthrough came from an artist who was not part of the government’s export strategy. PSY, a rapper and solo performer, released “Gangnam Style” in July 2012, and by December it was the first video on YouTube to pass one billion views. The founder-led K-pop agencies had understood the medium early. They put their music videos on YouTube free of charge and reached young audiences abroad without waiting for Western radio stations and record labels. BTS took the same approach further. Its seven members made their debut in 2013 at Big Hit Entertainment, then a small agency outside the three established companies and later renamed HYBE, and built their following by speaking to fans directly on social media. In 2018 BTS became the first K-pop act to top the Billboard 200 album chart in the US, and IFPI, the global recording industry body, named it Global Recording Artist of the Year for 2020 and 2021. Blackpink followed with stadium tours and in 2023 became the first K-pop act to headline the Coachella festival in California.
Film and television took a similar path. “Parasite”, directed by Bong Joon-ho, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May 2019 and four Academy Awards in February 2020. Netflix, which had entered Korea in 2016, released “Squid Game” in September 2021. The series was watched for 1.65 billion hours in its first 28 days, and its first season remains the most-watched in the history of the platform. In April 2023 Netflix committed USD 2.5 billion to Korean content over four years, twice what it had invested in Korea since 2016. More than 60% of its members worldwide had watched a Korean title in 2022.
Since 2024 the wave has widened into literature, theatre and animation. Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2024, the first Korean writer to do so. In June 2025 “Maybe Happy Ending”, a musical by Hue Park and Will Aronson that was first staged in Korea in 2016, won the Tony Award for Best Musical on Broadway. Also in June 2025, Netflix released “KPop Demon Hunters”, an animated film about a girl group whose members fight demons, set in Seoul and filled with Korean folklore, food and music. It had recorded more than 500 million views on Netflix by mid-2026, its song “Golden” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and in March 2026 it won the Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song.
The geography has changed with the formats. In the 2026 survey, 69.7% of respondents held a favourable view of Korean content. The share was highest in the Philippines, India and Indonesia, and it rose fastest in the UK, Japan, Spain and the US. In Mexico, Korean manufacturers arrived first, Korean food followed and K-pop came last. In the Korea Foundation’s count for 2023, Mexico had the largest fan community outside Asia. In 2025, executives at HYBE, at CJ ENM, the entertainment arm of the CJ group, and at the games company Krafton pointed to Latin America, the Middle East and India respectively as promising new markets.
In these years the audience became global, distribution moved from national broadcasters to a small number of global platforms, and Korean culture began to be made outside Korea, in some cases by companies that are not Korean. The shift brought scale, and it raised the two questions that Korea has yet to settle: who owns the work, and what makes it Korean.
Much of the commercial effect of Hallyu is found outside the entertainment industry. In 2025 the Seoul music critic Cha Woo-jin described Hallyu as a lifestyle and no longer only as entertainment. The 2026 survey shows the same shift. Korean food was the category that respondents most often described as popular in their own country, ahead of music and beauty products. Almost 65% said that Hallyu influenced their purchases of Korean products and services, up from about 58% two years earlier.
Beauty: Korea exported a record USD 11.4 billion of cosmetics in 2025 and became the world’s second-largest cosmetics exporter after France. The US overtook China as the largest market in the same year. Much of the growth has come from a new generation of companies rather than from the established groups. APR, the owner of the Medicube brand and still led by its founder, and Goodai Global, the owner of Beauty of Joseon and Tirtir, built their brands on Amazon and TikTok before they entered American stores. By October 2025 the stock market valued APR, which was founded in 2014, above Amorepacific.
Food: Korean food has followed Korean dramas onto supermarket shelves around the world. Exports of instant noodles reached about USD 1.5 billion in 2025, a rise of more than a fifth in one year. Samyang Foods, the family-run maker of Buldak spicy noodles, almost quadrupled its sales between 2021 and 2025, and about 80% of its sales come from outside Korea.
Games and webtoons: The largest content export is the least visible. Games account for almost 60% of Korea’s content exports, led by companies such as Krafton, the publisher of “PUBG: Battlegrounds”. Webtoons, the digital comics designed in Korea for reading on a smartphone, are one of the five sectors, with K-pop, drama, beauty and food, that the government has singled out for growth abroad. Webtoon Entertainment, which is controlled by the Korean internet group Naver, listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in June 2024.
Art, design and craft: Recognition has also come from leading cultural institutions. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London devoted a major exhibition to Hallyu in 2022 and 2023, and the Frieze art fair has been held in Seoul since 2022. The architect Minsuk Cho designed the Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2024, and Korean makers won the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2022 and 2026.
Fashion has been the exception. Labels such as the eyewear brand Gentle Monster have built an international following, and Korean groups own international brands such as Fila and MCM. No fashion brand created in Korea has yet reached the global scale of the beauty companies.
In branding terms, the letter K has become a country-of-origin master brand. K-pop and K-drama were followed by K-beauty and K-food, and the prefix is now applied to fashion, craft and much else. It lends each new category the credibility that the earlier ones earned. Lee Soo-man, the founder of SM Entertainment, has long described his approach as “culture first, economy next”. The culture creates the interest, and companies in food, beauty and other consumer categories turn it into sales.
A master brand that nobody owns is also exposed. No organisation decides what may carry the K, and the label is used on products that have little connection with Korea. In October 2026, members of the World Federation of Overseas Korean Traders Associations proposed a certification for Korean food and other products. Brand advisers and fashion buyers in Asia also report that young consumers there pay less attention to where a brand comes from than the generation before them. The K can open the door for a Korean company, but the company still has to build a brand of its own, as Samsung, Hyundai and Amorepacific have done over decades.
The cumulative effect of movies, music, dramas and games has been tremendously positive to the Korean economy and the Korean country image in the region. According to the Korea Foundation for International Cultural Exchange, Hallyu generated exports of USD 9.5 billion in 2018 and about twice as much in 2025. Hallyu has contributed immensely to Korean tourism as well. An opinion survey conducted by the KTO in 2019 found that about 1.1 million visitors came to Korea because of Hallyu and spent USD 1.1 billion, and that Hallyu-related tourism, on a wider definition that includes Korean food and culture, accounted for about 8.6 million visitors. With new concert arenas and other developments planned, this traffic is expected to increase, which will in turn fuel the growth of the Korean wave.
Some of the spillover effects of Hallyu include:
Rise of the Korean superstars: The main components of the Korean Wave – movies, music and the dramas – have given birth to a new generation of Korean celebrities who have attained superstar status across Asian markets including Japan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Bae Yong-joon (Yonsama), BoA, and others have been drawing huge crowds wherever they go. A case in point is when the then Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi mentioned in 2004 that he wished that he were as popular as Yonsama. This has given Koreans a great boost in their confidence as their stars are being looked up to by millions of people in the region. On a lighter note, this has also helped soften the tension during international discussion between politicians as many politicians who visit South Korea have been insisting on meeting these celebrities on a personal front.
In the 2020s, global platforms and luxury houses make Korean stars, as broadcasters did in the 2000s. Hoyeon Jung, known professionally as Hoyeon, is an example. She grew up in Seoul, worked as a model from her teens and finished second in the television contest “Korea’s Next Top Model” before she modelled for Chanel, Bottega Veneta and Louis Vuitton. “Squid Game”, released in September 2021, was her first acting role, and she won it at her first audition. Within weeks Louis Vuitton named her a global ambassador, and in February 2022 she and her co-star Lee Jung-jae became the first actors from a non-English-language series to win Screen Actors Guild awards.
Hoyeon has since appeared with Cate Blanchett in Alfonso Cuarón’s series “Disclaimer” in 2024 and made her feature film debut in Na Hong-jin’s “Hope”, which competed at Cannes in May 2026. Bae Yong-joon became a star through a Korean broadcaster and a Japanese one. Hoyeon reached audiences around the world at once, through a single global platform.
Increased interest in Korean tourism: Hallyu has given Korean tourism a shot in the arm and helped tremendously in repositioning the Korean country image globally. As the movies, music bands and the dramas gained popularity, people from many countries have been flocking into Korea to experience the Korean culture first hand. KTO has been very active in offering package tours which include a visit to the shooting locations, the various towns and resorts made famous in the movies and dramas and so on.
In 2019, Korea earned about USD 21 billion from tourism, attracting a total of 17.5 million tourists. Arrivals collapsed during the pandemic and recovered to 16.4 million in 2024. The declaration of martial law on 3 December 2024, which the National Assembly voted to lift within hours, raised concern about the effect on tourism and on the country’s image. Arrivals continued to rise. Korea received a record 18.9 million visitors in 2025, and the government has set a target of 30 million a year by 2030. Hits on screen appear to translate into travel. Flight bookings to Korea on the travel platform Trip.com were 25% higher in the three months after the release of “KPop Demon Hunters” than a year earlier. The side effect of this tourist boom has been an increased popularity of Korean cuisine.
Improved Korean country image: Korean popular culture has had a significant impact on the global fashion industry as an increasing number of Korean celebrities are included in the social fibre of fashion. New York has had its appearances of K-pop girl groups like Girls’ Generation, Hyuna from 4Minute and CL from 2NE1. The singer G-Dragon dresses in an influential way that gets international notice as Korean celebrities are known for mixing styles and genres in clothing. Korean popular culture products including TV series such as My Love from the Star, music from PSY, boy bands like EXO and girl bands like Girl’s Day, are putting Korea on the global scene. Since the late 2010s, the leading European luxury houses have made Korean stars their ambassadors, among them the four members of Blackpink for Chanel, Dior, Saint Laurent and Louis Vuitton.
Until the early 2000s, South Korea evoked the images of the Korean War, the North-South Korean conflict, the burgeoning chaebols, many of which suffered hugely during the Asian financial crisis, and the Seoul Olympics. All in all, there was little that was glamorous. Brand Korea was pretty elusive to everyone outside of Korea.
All of that has changed with the explosion of Hallyu. Hallyu has provided Korea with an excellent opportunity to showcase its diverse culture, people, its unique entertainment products, exotic locales and its own pan-Asian superstars to the rest of the world and thereby create a very strong brand Korea. With the maddening popularity of Korean movies and dramas, the focus seems to have shifted towards Korean values, society, emotions and the beautiful locations projected in these movies. This in turn has given Korea a good chance to create new perceptions and images of itself across the world.
All these factors have had the unstinting support from the Korean government, all the artists, businessmen as well as the Korean population. This collaborative effort has propelled Hallyu into a sustained cultural phenomenon rather than just a mere fad.
Hallyu is often described as a national project, but most of its assets are privately owned. The agencies, studios, cinemas, platforms and brands behind the wave belong to founders, to business families and, increasingly, to outside investors. Who these owners are, and how they govern, will shape the next decade of Hallyu as much as any government policy.
The business family: The longest commitment among the business groups has come from the Lee family of CJ Group. CJ began in 1953 as Cheil Jedang, the sugar business of Samsung, and became independent in the 1990s. Its chairman since 2002, Lee Jay-hyun, is a grandson of Samsung’s founder Lee Byung-chul. In 1995 the food company paid USD 300 million for a stake of about 11% in DreamWorks SKG, the new Hollywood studio. It then built or bought most links of the chain: the CGV cinemas from 1998, film financing and distribution, the music channel Mnet, the drama producer Studio Dragon and, since 2012, the KCON fan festivals abroad. Global recognition took almost 25 years. In February 2020 “Parasite”, financed and distributed by CJ, won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Lee Jay-hyun’s sister Miky Lee as executive producer. Few companies with dispersed shareholders would have stayed the course. It is a clear case of the patient capital that family ownership can provide. Miky Lee is vice chairwoman of the group, and members of the next generation hold executive roles.
The founders: The four leading K-pop agencies were each built by a founder who was also the chief producer: Lee Soo-man at SM Entertainment, Yang Hyun-suk at YG Entertainment, Park Jin-young at JYP Entertainment and Bang Si-hyuk at HYBE. All four companies are listed on the stock market. In family business terms, one person held three roles at once: owner, steward of the company’s culture and long-term direction, and operator of its daily creative work. The model gives speed and a clear creative signature. It also makes the company dependent on one person, and it can blur the line between the founder’s interests and those of other shareholders.
At SM Entertainment, the separation of the founder’s roles came through a contest for control. Lee Soo-man was the largest shareholder with about 18%, and SM paid up to 6% of its annual revenue to his private company for his services as chief producer. An activist fund with a stake of about 1% challenged the arrangement in 2022, and the contract ended that December. In February 2023 the management announced a new production structure without the founder and agreed to bring in the technology group Kakao as a shareholder. Days later, Lee Soo-man sold most of his shares to HYBE, SM’s larger rival. A month of rival bids followed, in which a court blocked Kakao’s first share deal and Kakao answered with a higher tender offer. HYBE then withdrew, and Kakao took control with about 40% of the shares. The founder has had no role in running SM since. The transition was settled through a contest between shareholders and bidders rather than through an agreed succession process.
The other three agencies have separated the founder’s roles to different degrees. At JYP Entertainment, Park Jin-young is the largest shareholder and chief creative officer, and he left the board in March 2026. At YG Entertainment, Yang Hyun-suk is chief executive producer and his brother Yang Min-suk is chief executive. HYBE is organised as a group of labels under a professional chief executive, with Bang Si-hyuk as chairman and largest shareholder. In September 2026, police referred Bang and four others to prosecutors on suspicion of fraudulent trading in connection with the company’s stock market listing in 2020. Bang and HYBE deny wrongdoing, and prosecutors had announced no decision by 12 October 2026.
New founders and outside capital: A third group of owners is arriving. In beauty, founders such as Kim Byung-hoon of APR have built companies worth billions of dollars in little more than a decade. In entertainment, the capital is increasingly international. Tencent Music of China bought HYBE’s remaining stake of almost 10% in SM Entertainment in May 2025. In December 2025 MarcyPen Capital Partners, an American investment firm backed by the musician Jay-Z, and Hanwha Asset Management announced plans to raise a fund of USD 500 million for Korean entertainment, beauty, food and lifestyle companies. Netflix spends far more on Korean series than any other Western media company, and it usually keeps the rights to the series it funds.
The patrons: Korea’s largest business groups and the families that control them have also become patrons of culture, at home and abroad. In 2021 the family of the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee donated about 23,000 works of art to the nation, and in October 2026 the British Museum in London opened an exhibition drawn from that collection. Hyundai Motor has funded the annual commission for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London since 2015, in a partnership that runs to 2036. Patronage of this kind can run through the companies, through foundations or, in some families, through the family office.
For owner families everywhere, the Korean cases point the same way. CJ shows what long-term family ownership can build in an industry where returns are slow and uncertain. SM shows how quickly control can be contested when owner, steward and operator are the same person and no agreed process exists to separate the roles. Both cases turn on stewardship, the task of holding a business in trust for those who come next. Unity among the owners, clear roles and an orderly succession are governance questions, and in a creative business they determine who controls the company once the founder steps back.
As Hallyu has spread, the industry has begun to ask what makes it Korean. Three answers are on offer, and each points to a different priority.
The culture: The first answer is that Hallyu is Korean because of what it contains: the language, the stories, the food and the history. The return of BTS in 2026 illustrates this answer. The album takes its name from the folk song “Arirang”, and the group presented it with a free concert at Gwanghwamun Square in the historic centre of Seoul, before a world tour of more than 80 concerts. RM, the leader of BTS, said in March 2026 that the members had looked for a theme to bind them together and had concluded that “even though there are a lot of international bands out there right now, we’re all Korean, born and raised in Korea”. The 2026 survey suggests that audiences abroad take the same view. It asked for the first time what makes a production Korean when it is made outside Korea. Respondents put Korean cultural elements first, ahead of Korean characters and a Korean setting. The country of production ranked below all three.
The system: The second answer is that Hallyu is a method. The agencies recruit trainees young, train them for years, form them into groups and build fan communities around them, and on this view the method can be applied anywhere. HYBE and its American partner Geffen Records formed the girl group Katseye in Los Angeles through a talent competition shown online in 2023, and one of its six members is Korean. HYBE trains recruits in Los Angeles and Mumbai, and an academy backed by SM Entertainment opened in Singapore in 2025. Bang Si-hyuk has said repeatedly that it is time to take the “K” out of K-pop. In groups managed by the four largest agencies, the share of members from outside Korea was at least 6% among those that made their debut in 2000–2004 and 47% among those that did so between 2020 and mid-2024. Almost half of the songs that these groups released in the first half of 2024 had mostly English lyrics.
The capital: The third answer is ownership. Jason Jaesang Lee, the chief executive of HYBE, set it out in August 2025: “If content is created abroad but produced by a Korean company, or even by an overseas entity backed by Korea capital, I believe it should still be considered part of Hallyu.” On this view, Katseye counts as Hallyu because a Korean company co-owns it, and “KPop Demon Hunters” does not. The film was created by the Korean-Canadian animator Maggie Kang, who directed it with Chris Appelhans. Its story draws on Korean folklore and its songs are K-pop. It was produced by Sony Pictures Animation in the US and released by Netflix. Korea gained visibility and visitors from it, and most of the earnings went to the companies that own it.
Ownership is also at issue for work made in Korea. “Squid Game” was written, directed and produced by Koreans, and it belongs to Netflix. Korean creators have complained that they did not share in proportion to the success of the series they made for the platform. Ted Sarandos, the co-chief executive of Netflix, argued in 2023 that broad investment in creators and production does more for the economy than profit-sharing. The culture critic Jung Duk-hyun holds that the industry accepted contracts that surrendered intellectual property in leaner years, and that it should negotiate fairer terms as it matures.
From a brand perspective, the three answers belong together. A strong brand has a core that stays fixed and an expression that adapts to each market. Culture is the core of Hallyu, the system is how it is produced, and capital decides who benefits. The risk for Korea is that the system and the capital travel while the culture thins out, until the K describes a production technique that any country can copy. The stronger position starts from what audiences abroad say makes a production Korean, which is its cultural content. Korean companies can add a Korean standard of production and, wherever possible, keep the rights.
Although Hallyu has sustained and grown for the last many years, carrying on into the future will be very challenging. One of the main reasons for its popularity to explode across the region has been its novelty and newness. After all, there are only a certain number of emotions! Though the Korean government and all the others involved have shown great maturity in handling this Korean wave, sustaining it over long periods of time will truly be a challenge. Commentators have predicted a peak several times, and each time a new format has carried the wave further: dramas, then K-pop, then streaming series. The challenges of 2026 are different in kind, because several of them come from inside Korea.
Some of the major challenges for the Korean Wave are discussed below:
Sustaining innovation in the cultural products: Innovation lies at the heart of the success of many Korean movies, music bands and dramas. To continue to lure viewers across Asia and beyond, Korean producers have to be innovative not only in the themes and stories but also in the creative execution. This is easier said than done given the enormity of the task at hand. Asian countries are all unique in themselves. Though dramas like Winter Sonata were able to tap into the underlying common emotions and become hugely successful, it is open to discussion as to how long Korean producers can continue to do that. This will prove to be a major challenge as the best-selling management book “Asian Brand Strategy” by Martin Roll has illustrated in much detail.
Innovation depends on a healthy industry at home, and that industry is under strain. Korean cinemas sold 226 million tickets in 2019 and 123 million in 2024, and admissions fell again in 2025. CJ ENM, the studio behind “Parasite”, planned to release only two or three films in 2025. The success of “The King’s Warden” in 2026 showed that a Korean film can still fill cinemas, but one hit does not restore the volume. Broadcasters cut their production by almost half in the two years to early 2025 as viewers and advertising income fell, and fewer than 60 drama series were expected in 2025. Song Byung-joon, a veteran producer and chairman of the Korea Drama Production Association, said in March 2025: “I’ve been working in this industry for 20, 30 years, and for the first time, I can’t see the road ahead.” Fewer productions mean fewer chances for new writers, directors and actors. Hallyu was built on that volume of production, and the hits came out of it.
Avoiding over-exposure of Korean stars: The main players in the success of Hallyu have been the Korean stars like Yonsama, BoA and others. These celebrities have emerged as regional superstars with major companies – local and international – choosing them as their endorsers. The movies, dramas and the various commercials are milking their popularity to a great extent. This may lead to an over-exposure of these celebrities. As the success of upcoming movies and dramas depends on these stars to a large extent, diluting their brand equity and image through over-exposure would not be a very good idea. At the same time, controlling this over-exposure will be a great challenge for everyone involved from producers, companies to the celebrities themselves, as each one of them will want to maximise the star power. Fans face a similar risk of fatigue. The agencies earn much of their income from multiple editions of each album, merchandise and paid fan platforms. K-pop album sales fell in 2024 for the first time in a decade, and again in 2025. In the 2026 survey, 37.5% of respondents agreed with negative views of Hallyu, and the reason they gave most often was that it had become too commercial.
Sustained investment from the Korean government: The Korean government has been actively participating and supporting the growth of Hallyu. With the campaigns by the KTO and other Hallyu-wood projects, the government will need to invest heavily and increase its spending throughout the entire journey. In addition, the government will need to work closely with the KTO and other authorities to think of innovative and effective campaigns to boost Hallyu tourist spends. To sustain investing over a long period of time and to see through projects thoroughly will indeed be a daunting task. The harder question is how the state invests. In August 2026 Jung Kil-hwa, a former head of the Korea Foundation for International Cultural Exchange, called on the state’s agencies to support the industry without interfering in it. It is the principle that Kim Dae-jung’s government set. The industry gained most when the state lifted censorship, built broadband networks and co-financed funds managed at arm’s length. Large projects initiated by the public sector, such as K-Culture Valley, have proved far harder to deliver. Hong Seok-kyeong, who heads the Center for Hallyu Studies at Seoul National University, has proposed a further step: a fund, financed by the tourism, beauty, food and fashion companies that have profited from Hallyu, to sustain the volume of new production.
Reducing dependence on a few acts and founders: The industry is more concentrated than its global reach suggests. The four largest agencies accounted for more than 70% of K-pop album sales in 2023. HYBE has bought labels from the US to Latin America, yet BTS remains its main source of earnings. HYBE’s shares fell by as much as 15% in one day in March 2026, after turnout at the group’s comeback concert fell short of early police estimates. Dependence on a founder is a risk of the same kind, which is why the separation of roles matters.
Securing access to markets: Access to a market can change for reasons outside an industry’s control. China was one of the largest overseas markets for Korean dramas and K-pop until 2016. After Korea agreed in that year to host the American missile defence system known as THAAD, Korean concerts, dramas and films largely disappeared from the Chinese market. No formal restriction was announced, and China’s foreign ministry has said that there was never a ban. The industry turned to Japan, Southeast Asia and the West, and the shift helped make Hallyu more global. In January 2026 the two governments agreed to expand cultural exchange gradually, beginning with areas acceptable to both sides.
Renewing the pool of talent at home: Korea’s fertility rate was 0.75 in 2024 and 0.80 in 2025, among the lowest in the world. Over time, smaller age groups will mean fewer trainees and a smaller home audience. Recruitment and training abroad will become more important as a result, which returns the industry to the question of what makes Hallyu Korean.
All in all, there is no doubt that Hallyu has catapulted Korea on to the global stage. With so much international attention on Korea and its pop culture scene and its creative economy, it is imperative for the Korean government to leverage on all its entertainment and cultural products to further drive the brand equity of Korea as a country.
Brand Korea needs to be able to strike a balance between not over-commercialising Hallyu and marketing and building its identity in a genuine way. The growth of the Korean Wave over the past three decades has been a fascinating one, and it is still unfolding. Moving forward, it will be interesting to see how Korea continues to innovate and tap on the massive potential and popularity of the Korean Wave to sustain its appeal to global audiences. This could further enhance the nation brand equity of Korea, and contribute to the continued success of the Korean society, economy and culture.
Promoting Brand Korea remains a task for the state, but the record also shows where that task ends. Hallyu has become an export industry and a country brand, and it rests on privately owned companies whose governance matters as much as public policy. For leaders, business families and policymakers, the Korean Wave offers five lessons:
The state set the stage for the Korean Wave, and founders and business families built the business. Its next phase will depend on whether Korean companies keep the rights to what they create, and on whether their owners settle governance and succession in good time.
Follow Martin Roll on LinkedIn >>
About the author: Martin Roll – Global Family Business & Family Office Expert
Read more: AmorePacific – Korean Beauty Company Going Global
Read more: Samsung – The Global Asian Brand
Read more: 10 Steps To Build A Successful Asian Brand
Read more: The Essential Features of a Global Asian Brand
Read more: The Stewardship Imperative: How to Build Multi-Generational Success in Family Business
Read more: The 3 Pillars of Success in Family Business: Family Unity, Harmony, and Cohesion
Read more: What is The Purpose And Value of a Family Office? A Global Overview
Read more: Insights & articles
Asian Brand Strategy provides key insights and knowledge about the rising Asian brands incl. model frameworks, brand cases and checklists on Asian branding. Download sample chapter.
