The day winds down, and I open the refrigerator door. I take out a green bottle. Popping the cap and swallowing the first sip, I don't bother to think about who made this beer. I just drink what I've always drunk. And according to the statistics, the odds that the green bottle is a Cass come to about one in two. When glasses clink around a table, one of every two is, without fail, the same beer.
In the last story, three sugar companies split the market 89 to 11 — and split it, at that, fairly evenly among the three of them. And they quietly matched their prices. Beer is an oligopoly too. But the shape of the division here is entirely different. There is no need for collusion at all, because one company already holds more than half. If there are balanced oligopolies, there are also tilted ones. Beer is the latter.
One Glass in Two
The domestic beer market comes to a little over 3 trillion won in revenue. More than half of it goes to Oriental Brewery's Cass. Add up HiteJinro's Terra and Kelly, which have contested Cass for more than thirty years, and you get around 20%; Lotte Chilsung's Kloud and Krush can't seem to climb much past 3%. The rest belongs to imports like Asahi and Heineken — and even that is only about 13%. Draw it as a picture and it looks like this: one large circle occupying the center, and small circles seated around it, warily watching one another.
| Company (parent) | Flagship brand | Beer share (approx.) |
|---|
| Oriental Brewery (AB InBev, Belgium) | Cass | over ~50% |
| HiteJinro | Terra · Kelly | ~15–20% |
| Lotte Chilsung | Kloud · Krush | ~3% |
| Imported beer | Asahi · Heineken, etc. | ~13% |
Cass has held this seat a long time. It has been number one since 2012 — well over a decade now. There was a stretch when its share of the at-home market slipped into the 40s, but it soon recovered to above 50%. Competitors launch new products, hire famous faces, mount sweeping campaigns every summer — and still Cass's seat barely trembles. Why is that?
Why the Soju Champion Loses at Beer
Here is an interesting scene. HiteJinro is the immovable number one in soju. With Chamisul and Jinro out front, it holds well over half the market. Yet the same company, once it steps into beer, has never escaped perennial second place. Same with Lotte: in soju it is a respectable number two with Chum-Churum and Saero, but in beer it sits last, at 3%. The same company, with the same distribution network, dominates one market and can't crack the other. What on earth is the difference between soju and beer?
Beer's wall is built from slightly unusual materials. First, freshness. The gap in taste between fresh beer and beer that has sat around is far wider than with soju, so the contest is decided by the distribution network that can rush fresh product into every bar and convenience-store refrigerator in the country. Cass has spent decades weaving that web of logistics and refrigeration tight. Then comes the on-premise market — who holds the draft taps in the restaurants and beer halls — and that is decisive. If the first beer ordered is a Cass, the next one usually is too. Habit flows from glass to glass. If soju's wall was built from a name and a taste, beer's wall was built from cold logistics and the tap handles of drinking places. And that wall is far thicker than it looks.
Who Owns the National Beer
At this point, though, I come up against one slightly strange fact. The owner of this national beer we drink so much of is not, in fact, Korea. Oriental Brewery, the maker of Cass, is a subsidiary of AB InBev, the world's largest brewer, headquartered in Belgium. Which means the profit from the green bottles we clink together on summer nights crosses the border, in large part.
Look at the numbers and the feeling gets a little complicated. Oriental Brewery's 2025 revenue rose 2.0% to 1.7785 trillion won, while operating profit slipped 5.4% to 346.5 billion won against the base effect of the prior year's surge. And yet the dividend it sent to its parent AB InBev that same year was 332.8 billion won. More than nine-tenths of what it earned that year. Look a little further out: from 2015 to 2025, the dividends Oriental Brewery paid totaled 2.7878 trillion won — more than the total net profit it earned over the same period (about 2.6041 trillion won). It sent out more than it took in. The fruit of that quiet power ruling more than half the domestic market flows, just as quietly, to Belgium. The dominion is exercised on this soil, but its fruit does not stay here.
Of course, even this sturdy wall feels the wind from outside. People don't drink beer the way they used to. They pick up non-alcoholic beer, switch over to highballs and whisky; a generation that would rather not get drunk at all keeps growing. Cass still holds half the market, but the vessel that is the market itself is slowly shrinking, or changing shape. However solid a wall may be, it cannot keep the courtyard it encloses from growing smaller.
Cass Takes the Market, Hite Takes the Paycheck
The company that rules the market and the company that is generous to its employees do not, in this case, coincide.
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Average tenure | Revenue per employee | Operating profit per employee |
|---|
| Oriental Brewery | ~2,011 (estimated)* | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | ~880 million won | ~170 million won |
| HiteJinro (beer division) | 1,492 | ~130.58 million won | ~19 years | — | — |
Basis: FY2025 (2025-12-31) annual report and audit report; per-employee figures on a separate basis. *Oriental Brewery is unlisted, so headcount is an estimate and per-employee figures are for reference. HiteJinro figures count beer-division staff only.
Half the beer market belongs to Cass's Oriental Brewery, but the higher average pay belongs to the perennial runner-up, HiteJinro — over 130 million won on a beer-division basis, with tenure reaching 19 years. The market's ruler, meanwhile, is an unlisted company with a Belgian parent, and as we saw above, its profit leaves as dividends across the border rather than coming back to its employees. Some two thousand people generate 170 million won of operating profit apiece, but the place where that fruit comes to rest is not the inside of this wall. First place in market share is not necessarily first place for the people who work inside it.
In the next story I want to take up something a little harder. The thing we sleep and wake inside every day yet rarely look up at: the homes we live in. We step into the oligopoly of construction, where five big names divide nearly all of the city's rebuilding among themselves.
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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