A few evenings ago, meaning to fry up some savory pancakes, I took the bag of wheat flour down from the cupboard. Resting on my palm, it was cool and heavy. A brand I had seen all my life was printed large across the bag, and it struck me that apart from the brand I knew nothing at all about the company. Decades of eating this powder, and even so. The cement of the last story was an oligopoly that had the power to name its price and collapsed anyway, for want of buyers. This time it is the exact opposite. A market with the power to name the price — and buyers who will never, ever disappear. Which is why these are the companies for whom collusion worked so long, and so well. The white powders that sat on my palm that evening, laid beneath the very bottom of our table.
The white powders under the table come, broadly, in three kinds. Wheat flour, which becomes bread and noodles and biscuits; starch and starch sugar, which make the sweetness in nearly every processed food; and sugar. Under names like corn syrup and fructose, they sit quietly inside soft drinks and snacks and sauces. We rarely pick these powders up at the market ourselves, but we eat them several times a day without knowing it. And in 2026, the white powders hit the news all at once. Accused of rigging their prices — and breaking the record for the largest fine in history, one after another, as they went.
Three White-Powder Brothers
All three are oligopolies held by a handful of companies. In wheat flour, seven companies hold 88 percent of the business-to-business market; in starch, a mere four companies hold 96 percent (and 86 percent of starch sugar). Consumers do not even know these companies' names, but the bakeries and the biscuit factories and the beverage makers all, in the end, buy their powder from them. An invisible wall, at the very bottom of the table.
What is interesting is that the same faces recur across all three. CJ CheilJedang and Samyang Corporation have their names on sugar, on wheat flour, and on starch sugar alike. The same companies, seated side by side at every white powder. For them to decide to match one another's prices, then, probably did not require any great resolve.
Records Broken, One After Another
In the first half of 2026, the Fair Trade Commission exposed the collusion in each of the three powders in turn. Each time, the words largest fine on record were attached, and the next announcement broke the record again.
| Product | Fine | Collusion |
|---|
| Sugar (3 companies) | 408.3 billion won (final 395.9 billion) | Feb 2026 · 8 rounds · under appeal |
| Wheat flour (7 companies, 88%) | 671 billion won | May 2026 · 24 rounds over 6 years, prices +38–74% |
| Starch sugar (4 companies, 96% of starch) | 747.6 billion won | Jul 2026 · 13 rounds over 7 years, prices up to +73% |
The seven flour companies matched supply prices and volumes twenty-four times over six years, starting in 2019. In those six years the price of flour rose between 38 and 74 percent, depending on the company. The four starch-sugar companies came to terms thirteen times over more than seven years, and pushed prices up by as much as 73 percent. The revenue caught up in the collusion comes to 5.7 trillion won for flour alone. On the numbers, the three white-powder brothers might as well have been running the same script. I think for a moment about the number twenty-four. Twenty-four times in six years is once a quarter. Every time the season changed, somewhere, someone met and matched the price. At that frequency it is less a conspiracy than a standing appointment.
Why This One Worked
Just before this, I looked at cement. An oligopoly that had the power to name its price, proven by collusion, and watched that power turn useless when construction collapsed. Naming a price meant nothing when no one was buying.
The white powders are the exact opposite. We cannot give up bread, and the sweetness in snacks and drinks is hard to avoid. Flour and starch sugar are necessities with no ready substitute. Which is to say: the courtyard inside this wall never dries up. So when a few companies raise the price together, the increase travels intact through the bakery and down into our shopping baskets. The consumer has nowhere to run. This is what makes collusion so frightening in an oligopoly that holds a necessity. Cement's wall lost its strength on its own as its courtyard dried; the white powders' wall kept its courtyard, and the collusion went through undiminished. The same wall defended by many — and what lies inside the courtyard divides the outcomes this far apart.
The People Who Don't Leave
These powder companies are, for the most part, old. Samyang Corporation was founded in 1924, Daehan Flour Mills in 1952. Seventy-odd years of milling flour and little else. The people inside stay correspondingly long. In numbers, it looks like this.
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Average tenure | Revenue per employee | Operating profit per employee |
|---|
| CJ CheilJedang | 8,232 | 84.11 million won | 9.3 years | approx. 890 million won | approx. 23 million won |
| Daehan Flour Mills | 404 | 84.4 million won | 13.3 years | approx. 1.13 billion won | approx. 92 million won |
| Samyang Corporation | 1,257 | 86.2 million won | 13.3 years | approx. 1.51 billion won | approx. 52 million won |
| Daesang | 5,106 | 68.23 million won | 12.2 years | approx. 860 million won | approx. 33 million won |
※ Based on FY2025 DART disclosures. CJ CheilJedang, Daehan Flour Mills, and Samyang Corporation are on separate financial statements (CJ's consolidated figures include CJ Logistics, hence the separate basis); Daesang is consolidated.
The constitution of a necessity oligopoly is laid bare in this table. Revenue per head runs from 900 million to 1.5 billion won — by no means thin. That is how much powder one person turns over in a year. But the profit left per head out of that revenue sits between 23 and 92 million won; at the worst, less than a third of the person's own salary. The money that flows is thick; the money that pools is thin. And perhaps it is that very thinness that explains why they gathered in one room so often. The thinner a trade's remaining share, the more visibly it thickens when prices are raised together, even a little. Though this, of course, is only the conjecture of someone who has stared at the table too long.
Old companies, people who stay long, and collusion that ran long. These three kinds of oldness are probably not unrelated. When people who know one another's faces grow old together for decades in a narrow industry, the words let's match the price pass a little more easily. Collusion often begins not as some grand conspiracy, but as a familiar glance between old neighbors.
The white powders are almost invisible to us. Yet they pass through our bodies every day. In that invisible place, a few companies rigged the price for years on end, and because these were necessities, we paid it without recourse. The three fines of 2026 are the record of an old script found out late. Yesterday, again, I scooped powder from that bag in the cupboard and made a batter. Stirring it, I wondered for a moment: of all the prices I have paid, how much was the share of that familiar glance? The bag, of course, says nothing, and I will go on buying this powder. I suspect they knew that, too.
But there are monopolies of exactly the opposite kind in this world. A company that holds nearly all of its market and cannot name a single won of its price. The next story looks into a strange monopoly whose door stands wide open — a monopoly in appearance only — and faces, head on, a single question. Not market share, but whether a company can name its own price.
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. The fines are as determined by the Fair Trade Commission; some companies are contesting them in court, and the amounts may change. It is not intended as a direct basis for investment decisions.
By Alexandro Lee · July 2026
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