Stretch the window from three years to five and Korea's unbroken-profit share falls from 45.3% to 37.7%
Of 2,049 Korean listed companies that filed a net profit in all five years from 2021 to 2025, 772 were profitable in every one. The same test over 2023–2025 passes 1,072 of 2,368 — the count moves with the window.
AI-assisted, human-reviewed sourcing. Figures are pulled programmatically from the official sources listed at the end of this article and checked by an editor before publication.
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The phrase turns up every autumn: so many years of unbroken profit. It sounds like a property of the company. It is at least as much a property of the window.
We hold annual accounts as filed with Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service for 2,709 listed companies with a ticker, now running from fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2025. Ask the same question over two different windows and the answer moves by nearly eight percentage points.
| Window | Companies filing in every year | Profitable every year | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023–2025 (three years) | 2,368 | 1,072 | 45.3% |
| 2021–2025 (five years) | 2,049 | 772 | 37.7% |
Neither number is more correct than the other. They answer different questions, and a reader who is told only “37.7% stayed profitable” has not been told which five years, or that two more years of history removes roughly one in six of the companies that cleared the shorter bar.
The other direction is worth counting too
Over the five-year window, 193 companies reported a loss in every one of the five years — 9.4% of the 2,049. Another 398 went from profit at the start to loss at the end, and 235 went the other way. Those four groups do not add to the total: a company that zig-zagged belongs to none of them.
Staying in the black is a low bar
Being profitable every year is one test. Growing the profit every year is a much harder one. Of the 772 companies that never lost money across the five years, 40 also increased net profit in every single year — 2.0% of the 2,049 companies we could test, and 1.5% of the listed universe.
By revenue, the largest of those 40 are Samsung C&T, LS Electric, Samsung Biologics, LIG Defense & Aerospace and Hyundai Autoever. We are not presenting that as a ranking of quality. It is the arithmetic result of one strict filter, and a company can fail it for reasons that have nothing to do with how the business is doing — a one-off gain in an early year makes the next year’s comparison impossible to beat.
Why the exclusion matters more than the headline
660 companies filed a net-profit line in some of the five years but not all of them. We leave them out of the count entirely rather than reading a missing filing as a loss. That is the honest treatment of a gap, but it is not a neutral one: a company that listed in 2023, or that stopped filing in 2024, cannot appear. What survives the filter leans towards companies that were there for the whole run — which is exactly the direction that would flatter a profitability statistic.
That is the reason we publish the denominator beside every share, and why the same page carries the three-year and five-year counts together rather than picking the flattering one.
The full breakdown, including the split by industry classification, is on the profit streaks page.
Data & Verification Notes
- Data as of
- Sources
- Financial Supervisory Service (Republic of Korea) / DART — Open DART financial statement API — annual business reports (사업보고서), report code 11011, fiscal years 2021 through 2025
- SeoulMarkets — Filed-accounts tape built from those annual reports (build-v1-financials-tape.mjs), 13,545 company-year rows
- Cross-checks
- Five-year test: of 2,709 companies with a ticker in the DART company register, 2,049 filed a net-profit line in all five years 2021–2025. Of those, 772 reported a positive net profit in every one of the five, 193 reported a loss in every one
- Three-year test on the same tape, restricted to 2023–2025: 2,368 companies filed in all three years and 1,072 were profitable in all three (45.3%)
- Every year is tested individually. An earlier build of this count checked only the first and last year and reported 1,168 rather than 1,072 — a company that lost money in the middle year passed. The published figures test all years
- Coverage by year, companies with a filed annual report: 2021 2,094 · 2022 2,187 · 2023 2,395 · 2024 2,528 · 2025 2,577
- Excluded figures
- The 660 companies that did not file a net-profit line in at least one of the five years. They are left out entirely rather than counted as a loss — but that exclusion leans the sample towards companies that were listed and filing for the whole run
- Quarterly runs. Our tape holds annual business reports, so a streak measured in quarters — the form these studies usually take — is outside what we can check
- Any comparison with published surveys of large Korean companies. Those count a different universe on a different test, and putting their number beside ours would invite a reading neither figure supports
- Whether consolidated and separate-basis filings are mixed within one company's five-year run. We carry the basis on every row but did not require it to be constant
The full dataset behind these figures — every listed company, every row — is available to license. SeoulMarkets data for licence →
Not investment advice. SMarkets publishes data journalism for general information only. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security — any investment you make is at your own risk and responsibility. Figures are derived from official public data sources and may be revised by the issuing agency. Verify independently before acting.
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