[Monopoly-1] The Wall the Law Built — Kangwon Land & KT&G

There are two kinds of walls in this world. One exists for the people trying to climb over it; the other exists to keep people from coming over. Most companies stand at the foot of the first kind. They make a slightly better product, shave the price a little, keep the lights on late into the night, and climb the wall a handspan at a time. Mostly they slip somewhere on the way up. That is ordinary business.

But very rarely, there is a company that lives inside the second kind of wall. Someone built the enclosure for it in advance, and the builder was none other than the state. A wall made without brick or cement — a wall called law. Invisible to the eye, and harder than most concrete.

I have been drawn to companies like that for a long time. To be precise, what I wanted to know was what kind of expression the people inside those walls wear as they go about their lives. This series is a story about such walls. The walls come, roughly, in five kinds: walls built by the state, walls built by nature (infrastructure), walls built by people's habits (platforms), walls built by a few companies joining hands (oligopoly), and walls built by technology and cost. Today's story is about the first and most brazen of them. A wall that exists because the law openly forbids competition. And about the two companies living inside it: Kangwon Land and KT&G.

The Only Door in Jeongseon

There are seventeen casinos in the Republic of Korea. And sixteen of them will not let me in, however crisp a suit I put on and however thick a wallet I carry. At the door they ask for a passport, and the moment it is confirmed that I am a citizen of the Republic of Korea, they politely ask me to turn around. Only one place — Kangwon Land, in Jeongseon, Gangwon Province — opens its door to Koreans. That single line explains nearly everything about the company.

None of this is an accident, of course. In the 1990s, coal died. And when coal died, the towns that had lived on it began quietly sinking with it. To hold up the sinking towns, the government threw them a rope with a long name — the Special Act on Support for the Development of Abandoned Mine Areas — and at the end of that rope hung Kangwon Land. To this one company alone was the admission of Korean nationals permitted. Put another way, any attempt to become Kangwon Land's competitor is, in itself, illegal. Is there a more comfortable bed anywhere in the world? And it is, moreover, the kind of bed money can never buy.

Open the 2025 report card and you can feel, at the same time, the warmth of that comfortable bed and the chill seeping in beneath it.

Item (2025, consolidated)	Result	vs. prior year
Revenue	approx. 1,476.7 billion won	+3.5% (all-time high)
Operating profit	approx. 235.2 billion won	-17.7%
Net profit	approx. 318.2 billion won	-30.7%

What this one casino earns is roughly equal to the other sixteen — the foreigner-only ones — combined. In May 2025 the ceiling on what can be wagered at a table in a single round was raised to 30 million won, and thanks to that, revenue hit an all-time high. So far, this is the textbook scenery of monopoly. It is warm inside the wall, the customers find their own way in, and there is nothing that needs to be hurried.

The trouble is in the sentence below it. Revenue at an all-time high, and operating profit down by double digits. The cost of employing people went up, and a building that has been running for more than twenty years began, here and there, discreetly holding out its hand. A monopoly on customers is not a monopoly on costs. A company that never had to wonder where the money would come from has begun to wonder how to keep the money it makes. Which may well be the more difficult question of the two.

And about this wall there is one fact that most people manage to forget. An expiration date. The Korean-entry privilege granted by the special act is set to end on December 31, 2045. A wall the law built, the law can also tear back down. Kangwon Land has lately been expanding its foreigner-only floor and spending 179.6 billion won to build a second gaming facility, and I read this as a quiet struggle aimed at a morning twenty years away. If you want the door to still be open the day after the wall disappears, there is nothing to do but begin preparing, slowly, now.

An Old Story About Tobacco

KT&G's wall is far older than Kangwon Land's. Trace the roots back and you reach the tobacco monopoly of the late Joseon era. There was a time when the state made cigarettes itself and sold them itself; that organization became the Office of Monopoly, then the Korea Tobacco & Ginseng Corporation, and then today's KT&G. The name changed several times, but the position the state handed down remained where it was, largely unshaken. Old stories usually survive that way — changing only the protagonist's face, a little at a time.

In 2015, a door long shut swung open. Philip Morris walked in carrying Marlboro and IQOS, and BAT followed. Ordinarily, this is the moment a homegrown monopoly staggers. A body grown used to the warmth inside the wall is weak against the wind outside. But KT&G did not stagger. That is something worth pausing over.

Company	Employees	Average annual pay	Average tenure	Revenue per employee	Operating profit per employee
Kangwon Land	4,906	approx. 81.5 million won (regular staff)*	15.8 years (regular staff)*	approx. 300 million won	approx. 48 million won
KT&G	4,331	approx. 115 million won	18.2 years	approx. 1.52 billion won	approx. 310 million won

*Regular staff, per ALIO (public-institution disclosure). Including seasonal workers, all-staff figures are approx. 71 million won·12.3 years.

One person at the casino turns over 300 million won a year and keeps 50 million; one person at the tobacco company turns over 1.5 billion and keeps 300 million. The difference in density between an industry bound by regulation and an industry that crosses oceans is written, quietly, in those two lines.

At both companies, average tenure is comfortably past fifteen years, and at KT&G it reaches eighteen. Eighteen years at one company, these days, means spending nearly half a lifetime under a single roof. Compared with the ordinary office worker who is quietly pushed out once he passes fifty, it is an entirely different timetable. The pay is not low, either. KT&G's average annual pay exceeds 100 million won, above the manufacturing and chemical industry average, and Kangwon Land's is in the 80-million range.

A wall with no competitors works as a wall for the people inside it, too. Just as it is hard to get in from outside, nobody inside particularly bothers to leave. That old wish from the preface — I just want to be left alone — is being quietly fulfilled here, in the form of numbers like fifteen years and eighteen years. What gets handed over in exchange for that stability is, of course, another story.

The next story is about a wall built by nature. KEPCO is, by anyone's reckoning, a nearly perfect monopoly — so how did it come to lose tens of trillions of won? It is the story of a slightly strange company, one that lives inside the wall and still cannot make money.

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