One night last summer, the breaker in my home tripped and the whole place went dark. Feeling my way to the fuse box by flashlight, I thought: surely I am not the only person who thinks about electricity only after it is gone. A power plant, once it starts turning, does not readily stop. Because stopping means disaster. When one large generator goes down without warning, billions of won vanish in a single day; when several go down at once, a city's lights waver. So attached to every plant are people who watch over the vast machinery night and day, so that it never stops for even a moment — replacing worn parts, putting hands on trouble before it becomes a breakdown. The work is called power plant maintenance. We barely know these people exist. But without them, the expensive transformers of the last chapter, and the plants themselves, are so much scrap iron.
This journey goes to those invisible people. And here, for the first time in this book, I find myself looking long at one person's name.
The Door a Public Company Held Has Opened
Power plant maintenance was, for a long time, the de facto monopoly of a public company called KEPCO KPS. The plants were mostly built by the state, so it seemed natural that the state's company should fix them. Like the Korea Exchange or the telecoms we saw earlier, a solid wall stood here too. But a door opened in this wall as well, and this time the private company that walked through it succeeded in pushing the wall back. Soosan Industries. In thermal power maintenance, the public company's share is being pushed back year after year from around half, and at the very front of the private companies pressing into the opening stands this one. And in the hardest territory of all: close to half this company's revenue comes from maintaining nuclear power plants — work not just anyone is allowed to touch.
A Wall Crossed Only by Time
Why can't just anyone do it? Because putting your hands on a running reactor and turbine calls for something money cannot buy. Skill layered up over decades of taking the same equipment apart and putting it back together. The collective memory of people who know, when a certain part makes a certain sound, what to suspect. I have watched the mechanic at a long-standing garage listen to an engine turn over and point straight to the trouble; this, so to speak, is the reactor edition of that. It is precisely the same material as the "wall built of time" we saw at Samsung Electronics and SK hynix. Only there, an enormous conglomerate built the wall — and here, a maintenance company no one was watching built one the same way, and broke through a public company's fortress.
A Man Standing at the Source
When I read the life of the man who founded this company, something in me goes quiet. Jung Suk-hyun. Born in 1952 in Jangsu, North Jeolla Province, the youngest of five children — four daughters and one son. He entered middle school at the top of the entrance list and attended on scholarship, but the family's circumstances put college out of the question. He finished a technical high school in Jeonju, joined Hyundai E&C through its open recruitment for high school graduates, and worked by day while attending university at night. What he did on power plant construction sites looks unremarkable: he kept detailed records of the work. Only he did not let the records simply pile up. After each project was completed he analyzed them, searching for how to cut cost and schedule and raise safety. After ten years of this he handed in his resignation, started out in 1980 as a small tool dealer, and in 1983 founded the company that stands today.
And decades later, this company won the maintenance contract for the Barakah nuclear plant in the United Arab Emirates — alone, over global giants like General Electric and Siemens. The hands of a technical-school graduate born with nothing, who attended university at night and kept records on the construction site, had reached the place where the world's most exacting nuclear plants are repaired.
I have seen many splendid walls in this book. Walls built by law, walls built by habit, walls built by time. Some of them had things to apologize for; some we could tear down with our own hands. But this wall is of a different grain. It was raised by holding on to the unregarded work of fixing things — not glamorous semiconductors, not platforms, but the lowest place of all — with nothing but time, records, and stubborn persistence. In the preface to this series I wrote that one should stand where the deepest source is. The name Jung Suk-hyun shows what that sentence looks like when it takes the shape of a person.
The People Who Don't Leave — Here, the Business Itself
Throughout this book I have counted, company by company, "the people who don't leave" — because I took tenure as testimony to how solid a wall is. But in power plant maintenance, the counting goes beyond metaphor. Here, people are the equipment; one skilled hand who has stayed long is, in himself, this company's asset. Maintenance is done not by machines but by hands and memory, so when a person leaves, the wall grows lower with him. At this company, then, "people stay long" is simply another name for competitiveness.
| Company | Employees | Average pay | Average tenure | Revenue per employee | Operating profit per employee |
|---|
| Soosan Industries | 1,214 | about 70.7 million won | 8.5 years | about 180 million won | about 22 million won |
| KEPCO KPS | 6,485 | about 83.2 million won | 13.9 years | about 240 million won | about 22 million won |
Based on FY2025 disclosures. Soosan Industries figures are on a separate financial statement basis (1,041 of its 1,214 employees are technical staff); for KEPCO KPS, consolidated and separate figures are nearly identical.
I set these numbers beside the chains that came before. Revenue per employee at the semiconductor equipment company: 780 million won. At the power equipment makers: 1.5 to 1.8 billion. In maintenance: 180 million won. Does it look shabby? I think this lowness is precisely the identity of the industry. Maintenance sells not equipment but people's time, so revenue is labor cost and the person is the product. That the company keeps only some 20 million won per head is for the same reason. And a small per-person number also means that the person cannot be subtracted from the work. If machines could have replaced them, the number would have grown long ago. Where value does not pool, people pool instead.
While the plants turn twenty-four hours a day, we do not think of the people standing behind them — the way we take it for granted that the light comes on when we press the switch. But what holds up that taken-for-grantedness is a pair of hands, somewhere in a plant that never goes dark, listening for a sound and changing a part. The work that looks lowest turns out, because no one can take its place, to be the highest wall. Tracing my way up the chain, I stayed at this station a long time. Because here I found myself looking past where the value pools, to where the person who made that value came from.
The next journey turns to the work of putting the electricity that plant makes into a vessel and keeping it there. A chain as difficult as making electricity: storing it.
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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