A while ago, flipping through the business news, I read that a construction company's credit rating had been cut a notch. A+ had become A — a story about a single mark falling off a string of letters. I don't even own the company's bonds, but my mood darkened for a moment, and I had forgotten the whole thing before my coffee went cold. And yet because of that one fallen mark, somewhere, tens of billions of won in interest were being recalculated. Who exactly are the people who assign that letter? That day, I didn't think that far.
If the reinsurance of the last chapter was a wall with an open door, the doors of these companies are locked with a padlock called a license. The overseas giants plainly exist — and still they cannot walk in.
Companies get report cards too. Letters of the alphabet, running from AAA down to D. That one short mark determines the interest a company must pay when it borrows money. Between AAA and BBB, the cost of funding can differ by tens of billions of won. So it is a rather heavy letter. And the companies that assign this heavy letter number exactly three in Korea: Korea Investors Service, Korea Ratings, and NICE Investors Service.
A Wall Shared by Three
The shares the three companies hold are almost perfectly equal. Together they account for 99% of the domestic corporate bond rating market, and for a long time that market has been split into thirds, as if someone had drawn the lines with a ruler. This is not the result of collusion. Credit rating is a licensed business that requires authorization from the financial authorities, and the licenses for rating corporate bonds have effectively stayed with these three. A new competitor couldn't get in for the simple reason that there was no door to get in through. It is the same lineage as Kangwon Land's casino license and SGI Seoul Guarantee's Insurance Business Act wall. Only this time, there are three people sitting inside the wall instead of one.
Half the Wall Is in New York
Look a little closer at the three, and an interesting fact comes into view. This surprised me too when I looked up the ownership: two of the three are not Korean companies. Korea Investors Service is a wholly owned subsidiary of Moody's, the global rating agency, and the largest shareholder of Korea Ratings is Fitch, another of the global big three. Only NICE Investors Service is owned by domestic capital.
This is no coincidence. The world's credit rating market, too, is divided more than 95% among just three firms — Moody's, S&P, and Fitch. Just as Korean Re's most valuable rooms turned out, in the last chapter, to be occupied by overseas players, in the world of credit ratings more than half of the domestic wall already belongs to New York and London. Only the method is different. With the door locked by license, they came in through the window instead — by buying up the domestic companies' shares outright. And a good part of what Korea Investors Service and Korea Ratings earn eventually turns into dividends and flows back out that window.
The Rated Pay the Raters
Hidden in this wall is a structure that looks strange to anyone. Getting a credit rating costs money, and the money is paid by the very company being rated. A firm that wants to issue bonds pays the agency a fee and comes back with a grade. There is an obvious tension here. How coldly can I score a customer who pays me? The rating industry has, in fact, long been suspected of grading generously. Issuers who want good ratings, and agencies who collect fees from those issuers. Grade too harshly, and the customer walks next door to the agency across the street.
And yet — or perhaps precisely because of this — business at the three companies stays steadily good. Just looking at Korea Ratings, the only listed one of the three, recent net profit grew nearly 20%, and dividends of close to 4,000 won per share have kept coming. A market with only three competitors, all three earning money the same way inside the same structure. The wall is quiet, and the profits are stable.
The People Who Leave God's Workplace
Up to now I have written that the people inside walls like these rarely leave. But at the credit rating agencies, for the first time, a slightly different scene comes into view. Rating agencies were long known in Yeouido as ‘God's workplace’ — the local name for a job so secure and so well paid it seems heaven-made. Average pay at Korea Ratings clears 100 million won with room to spare, and the other two sit somewhere in that neighborhood. High pay, stable seats. Workplaces that drew envy.
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Average tenure | Revenue per employee | Operating profit per employee |
|---|
| Korea Ratings | 172 | 126.91 million won | 11.5 years | approx. 640 million won | approx. 200 million won |
※ Based on 2025 disclosures. Korea Ratings is the only listed company of the three, so it is also the only one whose disclosed figures can be checked. Per-employee figures are rough values: consolidated revenue of 109.8 billion won and operating profit of 34.3 billion won divided by headcount.
The place the eye comes to rest in this table is, once again, the far left. 172. The corporate bonds issued in this country are graded — at this company, at any rate — by 172 people. A density in which one person generates more than 600 million won of revenue a year. But density is a two-sided word. It also means that the weight of the reports and the responsibility resting on each pair of shoulders is exactly that much.
And yet in the past few years, young analysts one or two years into the job have been leaving in a steady line. Most of them moved to brokerages or asset managers. As the number of rating reports each person had to write grew and the work grew heavier, there came to be people whom a high salary alone could no longer hold. The profit that a density of 172 creates, and the speed at which that same density wears people down — the two are the front and back of a single number. The wall stands as solid as ever, but the young people inside it are the first to look out over it. It is a scene we have not seen before in this series.
The three rating agencies appear to compete with one another. The three grade side by side, and sometimes hand the same company different scores. But what they truly contend for is not so much the accuracy of the grade as the heart of the customer who will come to collect one. In a structure where the rated pay the raters, the three walls end up facing the same direction. And the owners of two of those walls are across the sea. The next time I read that some company's rating has been cut, I suspect I will think first not of the alphabet but of the nights of the hundred-seventy-odd people behind it. One letter, built up out of those nights, moves tens of billions of won.
So much for the walls whose doors stand open, or locked with a license. But at the innermost point of this plumbing sits a monopoly with no concept of a door at all. A wall for which no alternative can even be imagined. A wall the state built on purpose — not for profit, but to protect something. The next story is about a company that reveals its existence only when a bank fails.
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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