October 15, 2020
07:19
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Big Hit, the company above Korean boy band BTS, doubled on its first listing on the Seoul stock exchange. The pop stars are now worth 8 billion euros and the very young
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‘Light it up like dynamite’, the seven-member boy band sings in its first English-language hit Dynamite. That is exactly what BTS does with its stock market debut on the Seoul stock exchange on Thursday.
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Big Hit, the umbrella company above the K-pop group, opened at 270,000 won (converted 200 euros). That’s double its introductory price of 135,000 won. After that, the stock went up another 30 percent, the daily maximum gain on the South Korea stock exchange.
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Dynamite is BTS’s first English-language hit.
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The IPO brings Big Hit’s market value to 11,000 billion won (8 billion euros), more than the other three major K-pop companies combined. The operation brings in 698 million euros and is the largest in South Korea in three years.
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With a successful IPO, Big Hit founder Bang Si-hyuk is bombing one of the largest fortunes in Korea with a stake worth 3.2 billion euros. The businessman shared his share with the band members of BTS, giving them 68,385 shares of the company each in August. As a result, the very young band members now each hold about 17 million euros of their own shares.
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Others at the management firm are also getting richer: An employee shareholders’ association subscribed for 1.4 million shares worth 499 billion won, meaning that each of the 297 full-time employees the company employs owns about 1 million shares. A recent law allows companies in Korea to allocate up to 20 percent of their IPO shares to employees.
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