The biggest companies in South Korea

“The ten largest” is 21 companies

Rank each of the four measures, take the top ten of each, and put them in one pile. If the measures agreed you would get ten names. You get 21. Only 2 — SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO,.LTD and HYUNDAI MOTOR CO — appear in every one.

Numbers are ranks, not values — 1 is the largest on that measure. A shaded cell is a top ten. A dash means the company has no figure on that measure; it is not a zero, and the company is not ranked last. The section below counts how many those are and which they are.

Read the dates before the ranks

The four columns are not measured on the same day. Market value is one trading day (2026-10-29). Revenue, assets and operating profit are the full financial year (2025 annual report). Months separate them, so a company whose business moved since its last annual filing will sit high on one column and low on another for that reason alone. Both dates are printed on every row of the underlying file rather than kept in a footnote, so any ranking here can be rebuilt against another price date.

This is data, not advice. Nothing here says a company is large in a way that matters, or that being large is good. No sector averages are computed — an average becomes a norm, and a norm is not a compass.

By market value

What the market paid for the whole company on one trading day. 2,684 of 2,709 companies have this figure. As of 2026-10-29.

By revenue

What came in the door over the financial year. 2,512 of 2,709 companies have this figure. As of 2025 annual report.

By total assets

What the company holds on its balance sheet, borrowed money included. 2,559 of 2,709 companies have this figure. As of 2025 annual report.

By operating profit

What the business earned before financing and tax. 2,525 of 2,709 companies have this figure. As of 2025 annual report.

Who has no revenue figure — and which half of that is our fault

Of the 100 largest companies by market value, 16 have no revenue figure here. That is not one fact but two, and they deserve different answers, so we count them separately. Across all 2,709 companies the split is 59 and 138.

The second row is our gap, not the market's. Those companies file a revenue figure; we have not read it yet. Rolling it into the first row would make this page look complete and would be false, so it sits here as its own line and will shrink as we fix the collector. In the largest 100 they are: SAMSUNG SECURITIES CO.,LTD · SK biopharmaceuticals Co., Ltd.

The first row is a real property of the filings. Banks, insurers and holding companies file an income statement built around interest, premiums or equity-method income rather than a single revenue line, so the standardised account is simply not there. Filling those cells with a substitute would make the revenue ranking look complete while comparing two different things.

None of these companies is dropped. They still rank by market value, total assets and operating profit; they are absent only from the revenue column.

Where the largest are listed

Company counts, not share lines: a company with preferred shares is counted once, under its DART filing identity.

Take the file

Free sample — the 100 largest companies by market value, every column: korea-valuation.csv. English company name, English industry, market, market cap, net income, total equity, total assets, revenue, operating income, PER, PBR, ROE, debt to equity, the price date, the fiscal year, the report code, the basis, and the reason where a row could not be computed.

Ratios for the same companies are on the Korea valuation tape. The full tape covers all 2,709 listed companies with the same columns and the same dates — see what is in the catalogue.

Sources, and what this cannot tell you

Financial statements: DART open API (Financial Supervisory Service), annual report code 11011, 2025. Market capitalisation: Korean public data portal daily price dataset, 2026-10-29. Built 30 October 2026, 20:10 KST.

It cannot tell you which company is the largest, because that is a choice of measure and the choice is yours. It cannot adjust for anything that happened after the annual report was filed, and it does not rank private companies, which do not file this way. This is not investment advice.