Most of Korea's listed companies are young; nine are older than the republic

The Korean stock market is, for the most part, a young market. The median listed company was incorporated 27 years ago, and 39% — 1,104 of the 2,819 that file a date — are under 25. Most of what trades on the exchange is a product of the last generation of the economy, not the last century. But at the far end of the distribution sit a few companies that were old before the country around them took its modern shape.

A young market with an old spine

Sort the 2,819 companies by incorporation date and the tail thins slowly and then not at all. 525 companies are over 50 years old. 115 are over 70. And 9 are over 100 — founded, by the date on file, before 1926, which is to say before the Republic of Korea (1948) existed at all. These are not holding-company reshuffles with backdated paperwork; they are continuously operating businesses whose corporate life spans the colonial period, the war, and the whole of the country’s industrialisation.

Banks and drugmakers at the top

The two oldest by filed founding date are Shinhan Bank and Dongwha Pharmaceutical, each about 129 years — a date around 1897. Woori Bank follows at about 128. Below them the century club runs through Kyungbang, a textile maker from around 1919, and Yuhan, the pharmaceutical company founded about 1926 and still one of the country’s most recognisable drug names. It is a telling list: finance and medicine, the two businesses that a modernising society needs first and keeps longest.

A caveat that matters here

For the banks especially, the founding date is not quite what it looks like. A modern bank is usually the survivor of decades of mergers, and the date it files reaches back to the earliest predecessor in that chain — not to the entity trading under the name today. Shinhan Bank as a legal structure is far younger than 1897; the 1897 belongs to a bank it eventually absorbed. We report the date as filed, because that is the company’s own account of its origin, but a reader should treat the oldest ages as the length of a corporate lineage rather than the age of one unbroken company.

What this is, and what it is not

This is a count of years since incorporation, nothing more. Age is not a merit and youth is not a flaw; this is not investment advice, and nothing here says an old company or a new one is the better business or the better stock. Incorporation date is also not listing date — a 1926 company may have joined the market in 2015 — and it is not a footprint. What the numbers show, plainly, is the shape of the market’s history: a large, young body of companies formed in the last three decades, standing on a thin spine of firms — mostly banks and drugmakers — that have been in business since before there was a South Korea to list them in.