Last night I drank a few glasses of soju with a late dinner. This morning, clearing away the green bottle still standing on the table, I held it up to the light — I couldn't say why. A little liquid left at the bottom, perfectly transparent. What I had swallowed without a thought the night before looked, to morning eyes, a little unfamiliar. Where does this transparency actually come from? Until now I have looked at companies one at a time. From here on, I look at chains. I will meet the same companies again, but this time I take the thing they sell in my hand and trace it back to the place where it was born. The first journey begins as close to home as possible — with last night's bottle.
Soju, in the end, is water and alcohol. The industry calls that alcohol jujeong — neutral spirits. The body of a bottle of Chamisul, the one HiteJinro sells, the one we met earlier, is exactly this. So take the thing called soju in your hand and step one pace back, and you arrive at once at a station called neutral spirits.
First Station — Neutral Spirits
We brushed past this station once before. Only nine companies in Korea make neutral spirits, and everything they make must pass through a single window — a company called Daehan Jujeong Panmae, the sole spirits seller — before it reaches the soju makers. And the price is set not by any company but, under the jurisdiction of the National Tax Service, effectively by the government. Already one trait of this chain shows itself. Whoever holds this link cannot name its own price. The government names it instead.
Second Station — Grain and Sugarcane
And where did that alcohol come from? It is made by fermenting grain or sugarcane. Here is the interesting part. Korea's neutral spirits run in roughly two equal streams. One is fermented spirits, made at home by fermenting the government's rice reserves or imported tapioca; the other is refined spirits — crude alcohol brought in from abroad and distilled once more. And that crude alcohol is made, for the most part, from sugarcane molasses out of Brazil and Pakistan. Which means that about half of the alcohol in the diluted soju we drink came from sugarcane fields on the far side of the earth. Worth adding, too: neither sugarcane nor tapioca has any commercially grown genetically modified variety to speak of, so these feedstocks are, without anyone trying, naturally non-GMO. And once the alcohol is finished, whatever it was made from, it is physically almost indistinguishable. The glass of soju we drink has, in itself, already been around the world once.
And at this station called grain, the chain suddenly explodes into branches.
| Where one feedstock (grain and sugarcane) splits |
|---|
| Fermentation → ethanol (neutral spirits) → liquor: soju, whisky |
| Fermentation → ethanol → automotive fuel blended into gasoline |
| Processing → starch sugars (fructose, corn syrup) → the sweetness in soft drinks and snacks |
| Polymerization → bioplastics → chemical materials sold as eco-friendly |
The same kernel of corn becomes someone's evening soju, becomes someone's tank of fuel, becomes the sweetness in that soft drink — the protagonist of the collusion we saw earlier — and even becomes plastic. A single substance, ethanol, hangs like a hinge joining liquor, energy, and chemicals. The goods we meet on separate shelves, traced back up the chain, branched off from a single field. When I consider that the glass I emptied last night and the sweetness of the drink I had at noon may have been siblings from the same field, a slightly strange feeling comes over me.
Where Does the Value Pool?
On each journey of Part 3, I mean to check the same thing: where in this long chain the power to name the price lies — where, in other words, the value pools. But on the dinner-table chain the answer is unusually blurred. The value does not pool at any one link; it is scattered in every direction. Grain prices are set by American weather and Chinese demand; the price of neutral spirits is set by our National Tax Service; the prices of starch sugar and sugar were pushed up artificially by the collusion we saw earlier. No one holds this whole chain. And so the feed and food companies that handle these raw materials, though they do the enormous work of feeding the world, rarely make serious money. The power to name the price gathers nowhere along the chain; it leaks away.
This is the landscape the dinner-table chain showed me on the first journey. Even if you trace a chain to its source, value does not necessarily pool anywhere. In a chain like grain's, at the mercy of nature and of imports, value scatters and flows like water. Somewhere inside the price of the bottle I cleared away this morning, American weather and the National Tax Service's stamp and a collusion in some conference room each took their share, and I have no way of working out the split. But this evening the bottle will be back on the table somewhere, and I will drink it knowing, now, a little of the long road that transparency has traveled.
And yet there are chains in the world that run the opposite way. Chains where the value pools at one link — a very narrow one — with frightening force. The next journey goes to the specimen. Trace back the chain of the hottest thing in the world right now, the AI semiconductor, and you can see just how narrow the place where value pools can become.
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
댓글
댓글 쓰기