[Prologue] I Just Want to Be Left Alone

I must have first met the word positioning in a marketing book. But look at it closely and it turns out to be a concept as human as taking a beer from the refrigerator and prying off the cap. At the company there is my role, and into that role goes whatever ability I have — however much that amounts to — quietly. When someone sets foot in that territory, I defend it, and at times I even have to handle, with some skill, the rather tiring business people call politics. And all the while, in one corner of my mind, I keep wishing for the same thing.

Ah, I just want to be left alone. I want this to be something only I can do, something that, if I keep at it, I'll slowly get better at.

It isn't much of an ambition. A modest spot, like a pair of sneakers worn long enough to fit your feet exactly — humble, but not easily replaced. That's about all a person wants, most of the time.

The Castle Wall Called a License

If you weren't born to rich parents — and most of us weren't — then human ability, sadly, comes in roughly one size. Acorns lining up to compare their heights. Above them stands a castle built of licenses and school ties and connections, and some people call the ones who live inside it the Celestial Dragons. A rather cartoonish expression, but a cartoonish reality deserves cartoonish language. Koreans know this almost by instinct. For my genes to survive, what once required skill at hunting now requires getting inside the castle wall called a license.

So in this country, spending on education is counted not as consumption but as investment. There are people who have actually done the math. According to China's YuWa Population Research Institute, the cost of raising one child in Korea comes to 7.79 times per-capita GDP, the highest in the world. In money, somewhere in the mid-300-million-won range. A gold medal nobody envies, won with a comfortable lead over second-place China (6.3 times). Say it costs 300 million won to raise a child through high school. Now add another 100 million on top, and suppose the child makes it inside the wall — inside a medical license, say. What then? In a Ministry of Health and Welfare survey, the average annual pay of a doctor had passed 300 million won as of 2022. You put in 100 million and secure a cash flow of nearly 300 million a year, from thirty to seventy, for forty years. A steal, no? If the slang bothers you, call it a rational allocation of resources. The substance is not the slightest bit different.

The funny thing is that the whole country is doing this math together. Total spending on private tutoring passed 29 trillion won in 2024, then bent downward for the first time in five years, to 27.5 trillion won in 2025. At first glance that sounds like welcome news, but look inside and it isn't quite. In the same year, the households that do pay for tutoring spent more than 600,000 won a month per child — an all-time high. The ones who give up slip quietly out of the line, and the ones who stay to the end bet deeper. The scenery in front of a castle wall generally looks like that.

Peer into the world of the medical Dragons and the structure comes into sharper focus. Let me say, of course, that I am sincerely grateful for the worth of their profession and the sacredness of what they do. The fact that the emergency-room lights are on at three in the morning is one of the few real consolations civilization offers us. That said, and quite apart from it, between pharmaceutical companies and doctors there is the old symbiosis of the crocodile and the plover. That a law punishing both sides of a rebate — the dual-punishment rule — came into being only in 2010 quietly testifies to the scale of that symbiosis. Doctors, to be sure, scramble desperately to get ahead inside it. Inside every castle wall there is another castle wall. Even so, to an ordinary office worker who gets quietly pushed out the door once he turns fifty, it is hard not to see all this as an extraordinary privilege. It is the last ladder-shaped profession, the one that looks as if anyone could climb it with enough effort. That is also why the whole country was in such an uproar over the medical school quota in 2024. And look how the commotion ended. The quota, raised once for the 2025 academic year, was quietly returned for 2026 to its pre-increase figure of 3,058. The attempt to add one more rung to the ladder went all the way around and came back to where it started. In front of the last ladder, people generally lose their reason. And the ladder rarely gets any wider.

Nations, and Television Dramas

Widen the view a little and nations are no different. You have the resources you were born with, you trade on them, you raise the value of the thing only you possess, and to hold that position you build up an army and thicken the shield called culture. The EUV lithography machines made by ASML of the Netherlands can be made by that one company and no other on earth, and so a single machine becomes a diplomatic card played between nations. That is where positioning ends up, if you push it all the way.

I won't say much about politics; that field has more than its share of frightening people. But an old television drama comes to mind. Sandglass, I think it was. There was a scene in which a group of student activists boycotting classes scolds a student who won't join them — at least, that's how it goes in my memory. And the student quietly asks a question back. We protest because the dictatorship silences dissent; if you won't allow even the freedom to dissent from your protest, how exactly are you different from the dictatorship? A cartel, in the end. Justice or politics, it makes no difference: people want to draw a boundary and stand on the inside of it. If you want in, you'll have to pay dearly. Even a company as enormous as Samsung Electronics aches with the turf wars between one division and the next. Magnify the picture as much as you like; the same pattern keeps coming out.

So What Are We Supposed to Do?

A fair question. It is, in truth, a question I am asking myself. What is a person who never made it inside the boundary actually supposed to do?

Get inside if you can. Regrettably, that is the most honest first answer. If you can't, look for a smaller boundary. A medical license is not the only castle wall in the world. Down alleys nobody bothers to look at, there are fences too — small, but sturdy enough. And if even that fails, finding an entirely different kind of happiness is also a way. This is not a declaration of defeat; it is simply changing the board you play on.

The industries and companies I will introduce in this space all have, without exception, admirable positioning. But what of the people inside those walls? With competition scarce, they spend rather unproductive days clutching their seats, saying words like quality out loud, living lives in which voices are raised over a single page of a report. They must faithfully keep their superior's small dictatorship running — because that is how they come to be called good at their jobs, and it is what lets them hold out until their own turn someday comes. It's a little sad. But let's be honest. As trade-offs go, that one isn't half bad.

In the end, companies and people are the same. You survive by getting inside a structure of monopoly. So I would like us — me, and any job seeker who happens to be reading this — to think it over at least once. What monopoly do I hold? Can it be sold? And the monopoly company that would buy it — where, exactly, is it?

The well is deep, and the bottom is mostly dark. But unless you climb down yourself, you will never know what lies at the bottom. Let's climb down, then, and have a look.

This piece is the preface to 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