This morning, again, I picked up a plastic-wrapped roll of bread at the convenience store. What kind of bread it was, I no longer remember. Which tells you how little thought went into the choice. Standing in line at the register, a thought occurred to me. Come evening, I would probably be pulling a green bottle out of some restaurant's refrigerator, and I would be just as thoughtless about it then. Two absent-minded gestures, one at each end of the day. Behind each of them stands a company. Behind the morning's bread, SPC Samlip; behind the evening's soju, HiteJinro.
In the last story I looked at the walls behind a packet of coffee and a can of tuna. This time, again, the table. Only these two walls, though they sit on the same table, stand in rather different ways. One is fastened to a factory; the other is fastened to an old habit of the human hand. And in 2025, the two walls had precisely opposite years.
The Morning's Bread
When winter comes, hoppang — the steamed buns — pile up in the convenience store's warming cabinet. I have not yet learned how to walk past them. The company behind those buns is Samlip. In the market for mass-produced bread, the kind baked in bulk at a factory and sold in plastic, Samlip's position is overwhelming. From Samlip hoppang to its cream buns, most of the packaged bread whose names we know comes from this company and its affiliates. Factories and logistics laid out across the country, and a brand stacked up over decades. A monopoly fit for a textbook.
And yet in 2025, this monopoly's report card was unexpected. Revenue held steady at around 3.3 trillion won, but operating profit collapsed to 38.7 billion won — down nearly 60 percent in a single year. Net profit fared worse: compared with the year before, 84 percent of it was gone. For a company with that grip on its market, a fall in profit this steep is not a common sight.
| SPC Samlip (2025) | Results |
|---|
| Revenue | 3.3705 trillion won (-1.7%) |
| Operating profit | 38.7 billion won (94.9 billion a year earlier, -59.2%) |
| Net profit | 14 billion won (-83.8%) |
The reason lay not outside the wall but inside it. Inside the factory, to be exact.
In the autumn of 2022, at the Pyeongtaek bakery plant of its affiliate SPL, a worker barely past twenty was caught in a sauce-mixing machine and killed. And in the spring of 2025, at a plant in Sihwa, another person died. After that the company began to spend serious money on safety, and stopped its lines every time there was an accident. It was around this time that the twelve-hour, two-shift rotation was changed to three eight-hour shifts. The factory was rebuilt in the direction of grinding fewer people into it, and fixed costs rose accordingly. That added cost came straight out of profit.
Here I find my hand pausing for a moment. Behind the sentence about profit being cut in half, there are two deaths. So whether this figure of 60 percent should be read only as bad news, I honestly don't know. It also means that a factory which used to bake bread through the night began spending its money on grinding fewer people into the work. One thing, though, is clear. The wall stood as high as ever, while the ground where the wall actually gets built was shaking at its lowest point. That monopoly does not mean stability — Samlip's 2025 shows this quietly, but with weight.
The Evening's Soju
Let us move to the dinner table. At a pork-belly restaurant we say, bring us soju — we don't name a brand. A green bottle comes anyway. Inside that matter-of-factness stands HiteJinro's wall. The company's share of the soju market is roughly 60 percent. At one point it reached 65. Two brands, Chamisul and Jinro, hold that position up together. And here is something I was a little surprised to learn myself: for twenty-five years running, Jinro has ranked first on a British drinks journal's list of the world's best-selling spirits. Not whisky, not vodka — the green bottle we order without thinking is the best-selling liquor on earth.
This wall has a different grain from the wall of bread. In the cost of a bottle of soju, factory equipment does not weigh as heavily as it does in bread. What holds this wall up instead is habit. The old memory in the hand: with pork belly, Chamisul. People do not study the label when they choose soju. They drink what they have always drunk. That habit is what the number 60 percent really is.
But habit, too, has a shelf life. People no longer drink as hard as they used to. They drink alone, drink at home, drink lightly. So HiteJinro lowered Chamisul's strength, ever so slightly, from 16 percent alcohol to 15.7. A drop of 0.3. A laughably small number, but in that decimal point I read the tension of an old company. So as not to miss the direction in which habit is turning, the wall tilts the angle of its own body, just a little at a time. The brand strikes up conversations, joining hands with the clothing labels and sneaker companies the young generation likes, and it has carried fruit-flavored soju into more than ninety countries. Soju exports have surged at rates in the 30 to 40 percent range in recent years. A wall of habit does not endure by standing still; it endures by renewing itself a little at a time. And habit renewed that way crosses even borders.
Of course, this wall is being tested too. An age that drinks less, a shrinking population, a taste drifting toward lower proof. In 2025 HiteJinro's soju revenue also slipped a little, and profit fell by more than that. But the number-one position did not move. A wall of habit generally crumbles more slowly than a wall of cost. It even buys time to change its own shape before it falls.
Same Table, Different Walls
| Category | SPC Samlip (bread) | HiteJinro (soju) |
|---|
| Market position | No. 1 in mass-produced bread (overwhelming) | About 60% of soju (Chamisul + Jinro) |
| 2025 | Operating profit -59% · net profit -84% | Held No. 1, gentle slowdown |
| Root of the wall | Brand + nationwide factory infrastructure | Brand + consumer habit |
| Weak spot | Factory costs · safety · accidents | Lower proof · less drinking · shrinking population |
| Recent moves | Safety investment · shift reform (fixed costs up) | Lower-proof renewal · export surge (2024 +44%) |
Two monopolies on the same table, and yet the constitutions of the walls differ this much. Samlip's wall is fastened to factories, so it shakes with costs and accidents; HiteJinro's wall is fastened to human habit, so it hardly shakes at all — if anything, it renews itself and grows beyond the border. Some monopolies cost a fortune every year to defend; others are maintained comparatively cheaply, resting on old habit. Inside the things we lump together under the single word monopoly, there are body temperatures this different.
The People Who Don't Leave
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Average tenure | Revenue per employee | Operating profit per employee |
|---|
| SPC Samlip | 3,149 | 53.16 million won | 6.3 years | approx. 1.07 billion won | approx. 12 million won |
| HiteJinro | 2,935 | 123.99 million won | 18.3 years | approx. 760 million won | approx. 59 million won |
Copying out the table, I stopped for a long while at Samlip's last column. The operating profit one person left the company over a year: 12 million won. The salary that person took home: 53.16 million. It was a year in which the share handed to the person was more than four times the share the company kept. On the books alone, the numbers stand upside down. But behind that upside-down number is the safety investment I wrote about above. The price of a year spent deciding to grind fewer people into the work is written there, in the rightmost column of the table. Whether to read this inversion as a failure of management or as a long-overdue settling of accounts — here too, I would rather withhold the verdict.
And when you set the two rows side by side, it shows plainly how differently two companies at the same table live. Pay differs by a factor of 2.3, tenure by nearly three. Earlier I wrote that the two walls have different constitutions; this table is the numerical version of that sentence. Inside the stable wall of soju, people stay long, leave 59 million won of profit per head, and take home salaries above 100 million. I think for a moment about eighteen years. It is the time it takes for a child born the year you joined to become an adult. To be able to spend that much time at one company is also to know, in your body, that the company rarely shakes.
Samlip's side runs at a somewhat different temperature. Behind the profit plunge of 2025 were the safety investments and the change in working hours, and that is, in the end, a story about the factory floor. The brand in the office may be solid, but the floor that actually bakes and hauls that brand has churned considerably these past few years. And at the center of that churning are the two deaths I wrote of above. Even within the same old monopoly, office time and factory time do not flow at the same speed.
Tomorrow morning I will probably pick up bread at the convenience store again, and again fail to remember what kind it was. That very absent-mindedness is the substance of the wall these two companies spent decades building. Not bothering to think of another option. Buying what you have always bought. A monopoly is often completed not by some grand barrier, but by the accumulation of small habits like these. Only now I know that the factory's time behind the plastic wrapper and the habit's time behind the green bottle flow at different speeds. The bread and the soju will be in their places again tomorrow. Only to me will they look slightly different.
And that green bottle still has one story left untold. The body of soju is, in the end, water and alcohol — and if you follow where that alcohol comes from, and how, another chain appears, leading out to grain fields and fermentation tanks. That story I will save for later in this book, for the chapter that travels back up the table.
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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