I remember the day, a few years back, when I put my seal on a jeonse lease — the Korean kind where you hand the landlord a large lump-sum deposit instead of monthly rent. The worn sofa in the realtor's office, the instant coffee, and, tucked in among the stacks of paper, a leaflet about surety insurance. I signed it without knowing exactly what kind of insurance it was, and never once took that piece of paper out again. It was much later that I properly understood what had happened that day: a promise — that if the landlord failed to return my deposit, someone would pay it back in his place — had been quietly slipped in behind my lease.
If the Korea Exchange of the last chapter was a wall whose door had just opened, the companies this time are walls whose doors have been open for a long time. And yet we almost never notice that the doors are there, because the companies themselves are all but invisible to us. Over a lifetime we buy plenty of insurance. Health insurance, auto insurance, fire insurance. But if something truly enormous hits the insurer all at once — a great typhoon, an air crash, a wave of claims beyond anything it can carry — where does the insurance company find the money? The answer is a little anticlimactic. Insurance companies buy insurance too. It's called reinsurance.
The Insurance That Insurers Buy
Reinsurance is an invisible business. We will never, in our whole lives, buy reinsurance ourselves. Its only customers are insurance companies. So the public barely knows the market exists — and yet this market, too, had for a long time what was in effect a single company. Korean Re. It began in 1963 as a state-owned enterprise called the Korean Non-Life Reinsurance Corporation, and for a long time it enjoyed the protection of a system that gave it first claim on the reinsurance ceded within the country. Just as Kangwon Land held its casino monopoly by law, Korean Re held its reinsurance monopoly by the power of the system.
But this wall had a door in it from the very beginning: the giant reinsurers overseas. Once the preferential cession system was abolished and they came in, Korean Re's domestic share settled downward, little by little, from 68.9% in 2022 to 56.5% in 2024. And here the paradox we saw at the Korea Exchange appears again. Even as its share was being shaved away, Korean Re's net profit in 2025 came to 315.5 billion won, the largest since its founding. Half the secret lay in the money it manages. The return on assets accumulated over decades came to nearly 6%, and a year of stable loss ratios, free of major disasters, supplied the other half. Even at the moment the wall was getting lower, the money gathered over a long time held the company up.
What Korean Re Cannot Hold
But the phrase ‘number one in Korea’ comes with a hidden footnote. The risks that are truly large and truly difficult are not in this number one's hands.
This is something I only learned while digging through the material. There is a kind of insurance you buy when companies are bought and merged — insurance for the day the seller's promise that ‘there are no hidden problems in this company’ turns out to be wrong. In this line, what domestic insurers can digest stops at smaller deals of no more than 100 billion won. The risk on anything larger is carried by the capital of overseas reinsurers, and the domestic company is closer to a teller's window that issues the policy. The same goes for the insurance that covers ships in trade and shipping when they have accidents. That field has long been divided up, in effect, among a handful of global mutual insurance clubs, and most Korean shipowners buy their cover through that door too. In short, Korean Re's wall isn't merely one whose door stands open — the most valuable rooms were occupied by overseas players from the start. Being number one in Korea also meant being number one among what was left after everyone else had taken theirs.
The Guarantee Behind the Contract
Among these same ‘invisible insurances’ there is a company at the opposite extreme, one with almost no door at all. SGI Seoul Guarantee. This is the company that stood behind the leaflet I signed so absently in that realtor's office. We have no memory of ever contracting with it directly, but when you sign a jeonse lease, or buy something in installments, or when a builder takes on a construction job, SGI Seoul Guarantee's surety is often quietly tucked in behind the contract. A guarantee that if the promise is broken, it will pay in your place. And this company's monopoly is utterly explicit. The Insurance Business Act effectively permits only one company to specialize in surety insurance. Korean Re's door was always open; SGI Seoul Guarantee's door was locked shut by the law itself.
In 2025, SGI Seoul Guarantee earned a net profit of 264.2 billion won, and in March it even listed on the stock exchange. But the really interesting part of this company is where the profit goes. That year it paid out 200 billion won in dividends, and the shareholder collecting the most was the Korea Deposit Insurance Corporation, which still held 83.85% of the shares even after the listing — in other words, the government. Earlier I wrote that the profits of Cass, the national beer, flow to a headquarters in Belgium. SGI Seoul Guarantee is exactly the opposite. The profits of this monopoly don't cross any border; they go straight back into the national treasury, because this is the channel through which the public funds once spent to save the company are being recovered.
The People Who Don't Leave
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Average tenure | Net profit per employee |
|---|
| Korean Re | 446 | 176.5 million won | 10.7 years | approx. 710 million won |
| SGI Seoul Guarantee | 1,547 | 119.99 million won | 13.9 years | approx. 170 million won |
※ Based on 2025 disclosures. Net profit per employee is a rough figure: 2025 net profit (Korean Re 315.5 billion won, SGI Seoul Guarantee 264.2 billion won) divided by headcount.
Life inside these quiet walls is, at both companies, among the best paid anywhere in finance. Korean Re's average pay, per its disclosures, reaches 176.5 million won with average tenure of nearly eleven years, and SGI Seoul Guarantee's sits around 120 million. The back room whose name the public doesn't even know is, for the people who work inside it, a seat that others envy. But the number in this table I keep going back to isn't the pay. It's on the far left. 446. The company standing behind every insurance policy in this country is, by headcount alone, a small business. And each one of those people leaves behind 710 million won a year. The more invisible the wall, the higher the density of the people inside it. The quieter the wall, the more comfortable, usually, the life within.
Reinsurance and surety insurance. Companies whose names we will say only a handful of times in our lives. But the two walls wear different expressions. Korean Re's wall, its door always open, gave up its most valuable rooms to players overseas; SGI Seoul Guarantee's wall is locked and solid, but its profits return to the treasury. How far has the door opened, and where does the profit inside flow? Before these two questions, even the same ‘invisible monopoly’ shows completely different faces. The next time I have to put my seal on something, will I pause to think of the company standing behind the paperwork? Probably I'll sign just as absently as before. Only it will be a slightly different kind of absent-mindedness.
The companies in the next story are places where the door is locked in yet another way. An oligopoly locked with a license, where the overseas giants plainly exist and still cannot come in. The story of the three companies that grade corporate credit in letters of the alphabet.
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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