This morning, again, I pushed open the door of the building I pass through every day. Waiting for the elevator, without any particular thought, I laid my palm against the wall. Cold, hard, faintly rough to the touch. Beneath a single coat of paint is concrete, and what makes that concrete set is a gray powder called cement. In the stories before this one, I looked at things we eat every day. Sugar, beer, ramyun. This time it is not something we eat, but something we sit inside all day long. I will probably never have occasion, more than a few times in my life, to say aloud the names of the companies that make this powder. And yet behind the walls of nearly every space where I sleep and work and eat, this handful of companies is standing. An invisible wall — and the most physical one of all.
A Gray Market, Divided
Domestic cement is made, in effect, by five or six companies. Ssangyong C&E, Hanil Cement, Asia Cement, Sungshin Cement, Sampyo Cement. For a long time Ssangyong was first; in 2025, when Hanil resolved to merge with its affiliate (resolved in July, launched as one company in November), the order flipped.
| Company | Domestic share | Note |
|---|
| Hanil Cement Group | approx. 21.8% | Merger resolved July 2025 (launched in November); rose to No. 1 |
| Ssangyong C&E | approx. 21.2% | Delisted in 2024 (private-equity takeover) |
| Asia · Sungshin · Sampyo and others | approx. 10% each | Split the remainder |
Cement has one property that makes this oligopoly unusually solid. It is heavy. Carry the gray powder too far, and the freight outruns the price. So each company, by and large, takes charge of the region around its own plants. It is a structure in which no one needs to covet the yard next door in order to make a living. Seen across the whole country, it is a textbook oligopoly, held in balance by a few hands.
The Days When They Named the Price
When several stand side by side selling the same thing, it is not long before the same temptation comes calling. The urge to read one another's faces and raise prices in step. All the more so when the front yards are already divided; matching prices becomes that much easier. The cement industry gave in to that temptation more than once. In 2016 the Fair Trade Commission found that six cement makers, Ssangyong among them, had rigged market shares and prices for three years starting in 2011, and levied fines of 199.4 billion won. Ssangyong's share alone came to 87.4 billion. The same year, in another product called dry mortar, three companies paid 57.3 billion for collusion.
This is the old habit of this oligopoly. Walls that stand in a row can, with nothing more than a promise among themselves, raise the price together. As the sugar companies we saw earlier did. Cement, too, was for a long time a wall that could name its own price.
And Yet, Even Naming the Price
In 2025, something unexpected happened to this wall. The power to name the price was intact — and the buyers disappeared.
| 2025 | Details |
|---|
| Cement shipments | approx. 36.5 million tons — lowest in 34 years |
| Ssangyong C&E operating profit | approx. -57% year on year (first three quarters, cumulative) |
| Hanil · Asia operating profit | Hanil -51% · Asia around -45% |
Construction stopped. New apartments, new roads — neither gets built the way it used to. It took some time for the shock to travel all the way down to the gray powder, but it came down in the end. Cement shipments in 2025 were the lowest since 1991, thirty-four years earlier. Compared with a few years ago, volume is down by more than a quarter. One market-analysis outlet called it the first crack in thirty years.
The other evening on my way home, I passed a construction site that has been standing still for a long time. The steel frame half-risen, the dust screens swelling in the wind and settling again, over and over. Passing it, I thought: each one of these stopped sites must remain, at some kiln somewhere, as gray powder that never found a buyer.
And here the story turns over. A wall that could name its price — cement had proven as much several times, by collusion. But the empty construction sites of 2025 show the other face of that power. Even if you can name the price, it comes to nothing if no one is there to pay it. However high the wall, when the courtyard inside it dries up, the wall loses its strength.
The People Who Don't Leave
Cement is made in enormous kilns that, once lit, are almost never allowed to go out. It is a round-the-clock apparatus industry, and the people who work inside tend to stay long as well. In numbers, it looks like this.
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Average tenure | Revenue per employee | Operating profit per employee |
|---|
| Ssangyong C&E | 1,091 | 101.62 million won | 16.9 years | approx. 1.36 billion won | approx. 97 million won |
| Hanil Cement | 980 | 84.56 million won | 16.4 years | approx. 1.45 billion won* | approx. 140 million won* |
| Asia Cement | 495 | 95.33 million won | 9.8 years | approx. 920 million won | approx. 86 million won |
※ Based on FY2025 DART disclosures. Ssangyong C&E is consolidated (its final disclosure, ahead of the December 2025 merger); Asia is on a separate basis. *Hanil is a rough figure dividing consolidated results (revenue 1.4239 trillion won, operating profit 132.7 billion) by parent-company headcount.
A thousand-odd people make more than a billion won of powder per head each year, and stay sixteen years. This is what the density of an apparatus industry looks like. The kiln is larger than the people, and the people's time stretches to match the kiln's. Sixteen years is long enough for someone who came in new to know the kiln's temperament like their own body. But in 2025 that density was pressed down whole. The thick figure of a billion won per head was, all along, a figure for when there were buyers in the courtyard; when demand collapsed, the three companies' profits sank together, each roughly cut in half. The denser the industry, the more everyone gets pressed down together.
And in 2025, even in those solid plants, there were kilns whose fires were put out for a while. With nowhere to sell, there was that much less reason to make. To put out a kiln that is almost never put out means this industry is passing through a kind of winter it has never known. However solid the wall, when the courtyard empties, the fires inside go out one by one.
Tomorrow morning I will lay my hand, without thinking, against the same building's wall. The cold, hard touch will be no different from yesterday's. Only now, behind that hardness, I will find myself thinking of companies that held the power to name the price and lost the people who would pay it, and of kilns gone briefly dark. Which comes first — the wall, or the courtyard? Cement's 2025 seems to know the answer already, and something about that answer leaves me a little desolate.
In the next story we return to the table, to another oligopoly laid beneath the rice and the bread and the biscuits. In the very year cement named its price and could not sell, there were companies that named theirs and did very well indeed. The companies of wheat flour and starch, which have just taken record collusion fines, one after another.
This piece is part of the "Korea Value Chain" series and is an original work. It is an analysis based on public data and industry sources; some figures and assessments are estimates. It is not intended as a direct basis for investment decisions.
By Alexandro Lee · July 2026
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