Korea's listed pop-culture companies employ 15,072 people. They stay half as long as the rest of the market.

Korea’s pop-culture export is usually measured by what the world watched. Netflix has published its weekly global Top 10 for 265 straight weeks, and over that span 236 Korean titles have appeared on it, for 23.7 billion hours viewed. Squid Game alone accounts for 5.05 billion of those hours and held the chart for 42 weeks.

The other side of that trade — the people — is almost never counted. It can be. Korean companies disclose the average tenure, headcount, pay and gender split of their own staff in their annual filings. Fourteen listed entertainment and game companies file that disclosure. Between them they employ 15,072 people.

They leave in half the time

The average employee at these 14 companies has been there 5.5 years, weighting each company by how many people it employs. The same field on the same filing, across all 2,779 listed Korean companies that report it, gives 11.3 years for 1.87 million workers.

So the industry that carries Korea’s cultural export turns its staff over roughly twice as fast as the listed economy around it.

The obvious explanation is age: these are young companies, and you cannot have eleven-year tenure at a ten-year-old firm. It does not hold up on its own. These 14 average 26 years since incorporation against 43.5 for the listed market — younger, but not half as young, while tenure is roughly half. Within the 14, tenure and company age correlate at only 0.30, and the ratio between them runs from 13% to 46% with no visible pattern. Youth is part of it. It is not the whole of it, and we cannot say from a filing what the rest is.

Two halves, mirror images

Split the 14 by the industry code they file under and the tenure gap between entertainment and games nearly disappears — 5.3 years against 5.6. Almost everything else about the two workforces is opposite.

Seven of the eight entertainment companies are majority-women, from 60.3% to 71.8%. All six game companies are majority-men, from 61.5% to 71.1%. The ranges do not overlap. The single exception is Contentree JoongAng at 37.9%, which sits inside the games band rather than beside its own group.

Games pay more: ₩108.6m per employee against ₩81.9m, about a third higher on the same disclosure.

Put plainly, the K-pop and drama business is a workforce of women that is paid less, and the game business is a workforce of men that is paid more, and the two are usually spoken about as one industry.

What the spread does not mean

Within each group the tenure range is wide — 2.19 to 6.89 years in entertainment, 3.20 to 7.47 in games. It is tempting to read the low end as churn. The filing does not support that reading.

An average tenure figure moves for two opposite reasons: people leaving, and people arriving. A company that doubles its headcount in a year halves its average tenure without a single resignation. HYBE at 2.96 years and Krafton at 3.20 are both companies that grew hard. We cannot separate the two causes from one number a year, so we do not rank these companies and we do not call any of them a bad place to work.

What the numbers do support is the size of the thing. Fourteen companies. 15,072 people. That is the listed core of an industry whose output the world has now watched for 23.7 billion hours — and it is roughly the payroll of a single mid-sized Korean manufacturer.