Industry
Korea's television exports moved to companies where people stay half as long
Terrestrial broadcasters were 81.5% of Korea's TV exports in 2012 and 7.2% in 2024. Their staff average 10.3 years of service — the longest in Korean content. The producers who took the trade average 5.4 to 7.3.
Two Korean datasets, published by different bodies for different reasons, happen to describe the same industry from opposite ends. Put them next to each other and the shape of the last decade shows up.
The trade
Korean broadcast programme exports grew from $233.8m in 2012 to $1.26bn in 2024 — 5.4 times. Almost none of that growth went to the companies that used to do the exporting.
| 2012 | 2024 | |
|---|---|---|
| Terrestrial broadcasters | 81.5% | 7.2% |
| Independent production companies | 7.2% | 51.4% |
| Cable and satellite channels | 11.3% | 23.4% |
In money, the terrestrial broadcasters peaked at $278.5m in 2016 and sold $91.0m in 2024. They did not merely lose share to a growing market; they sold less than a third of what they once did, in nominal dollars, while the market around them quintupled.
The workforce
Now the other dataset. Every listed Korean company discloses the average tenure of its own staff. Group those companies by the industry code they file under and the content industry splits cleanly.
| Industry code | Companies | Staff | Average tenure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broadcasting | 12 | 6,393 | 10.33 yr |
| Film, video and audio production | 40 | 10,540 | 7.32 yr |
| Publishing (includes games) | 196 | 51,876 | 5.44 yr |
| Every listed Korean company | 2,779 | 1,865,198 | 11.29 yr |
Broadcasting is the only part of Korean content that looks like the rest of the Korean stock market. Its people stay a decade, close to the 11.29-year market average. Everywhere else in content, they stay five to seven years.
Putting them together, carefully
So the export business moved out of the companies with the longest-serving staff and into companies where the average employee has been there half as long.
That sentence is worth stating precisely, because it is easy to over-read.
It is not causal. These are two unrelated sources. A third explanation covers both without either causing the other: demand moved to serialised drama commissioned by streaming platforms, which is a business built by project-assembled teams rather than by permanent staff. Neither dataset measures that, so neither can confirm it.
The categories are not a matched pair. The trade survey’s “independent production companies” and the filing’s “film, video and audio production” overlap, but one is a survey’s classification of exporters and the other is a company’s own filed industry code — and a great many independent producers are private and file nothing at all. The direction is solid. The correspondence is not exact, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
And short tenure is not a verdict. An average tenure figure falls when people leave and equally when people arrive. A firm that doubles its headcount halves its average tenure without one resignation. The companies taking this trade are the ones that have been hiring.
What survives all of that is still worth knowing. The institutions that carried Korean television abroad for a generation now account for one dollar in twenty-six of that trade. The work went somewhere, and where it went, people have not been there long.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Korea Creative Content Agency (한국콘텐츠진흥원) — 콘텐츠산업조사 (Content Industry Survey), table DT_113_STBL_1025706 — broadcast programme exports by type of company, 2012–2024, via KOSIS open API · https://kosis.kr
- Financial Supervisory Service (Korea), DART — Annual report employee disclosures (직원 등의 현황), filing year 2025, all 2,779 listed companies reporting both tenure and headcount · https://dart.fss.or.kr
What we checked
- The two sides come from unrelated bodies — a content-industry survey and a securities filing — and are reported here side by side. Neither is derived from the other, and nothing here claims one caused the other
- Export figures are summed from the survey's own export-form breakdown for each company type. Terrestrial exports peaked at $278.5m in 2016 and were $91.0m in 2024; independent producers went from $16.8m in 2012 to $645.6m in 2024, against a total that went from $233.8m to $1,257.2m
- The four named exporter types now sum to the published total: exactly in 2024 and within $2,000 in every other year, which is rounding. Where the survey publishes its own per-type subtotal — eight cells across 2022 to 2024 — our sum matches it to within $1,000
- Tenure is headcount-weighted within each industry code, from the same field of the same filing for every company: broadcasting 10.33 years across 12 companies and 6,393 staff, film/video/audio production 7.32 across 40 and 10,540, publishing 5.44 across 196 and 51,876. The listed market as a whole is 11.29 across 1.87 million workers
What we left out, and why
- Any equivalence between the two datasets' categories. The trade survey's 'independent production companies' and the filing's 'film, video and audio production' overlap but are not the same set — one is a survey classification of exporters, the other is a company's own filed industry code, and many independent producers are private and file nothing. The comparison is directional, not a matched pair
- Individual broadcasters. The export table breaks terrestrial exports down by company; reproducing that turns a structural picture into a league table, and we do not publish it
- Any claim that short tenure caused the export shift, or that long tenure prevented it. Both are consistent with a third cause — the demand moving to serialised drama commissioned by streamers — that neither dataset measures
- Private production companies, which file no comparable employee disclosure. The tenure figures cover the listed part of the industry only
- Pay. Both datasets carry it, but the export and employment figures are on different bases and a per-head export figure would be arithmetic without meaning