HYBE founder Bang Si-hyuk says there was no 'battle' with SM Entertainment

Industry

HYBE founder Bang Si-hyuk says there was no 'battle' with SM Entertainment

Published: 15 Mar. 2023, 18:42

HYBE Chairman Bang Si-hyuk [YONHAP]

HYBE did not lose in a battle to take over SM Entertainment because it was never a battle, HYBE founder and chairman Bang Si-hyuk said in a press conference held by a local journalists’ club on Wednesday.

"I never considered the acquisition attempt of SM a battle [...] I am satisfied that we went in and made huge contributions in fixing SM’s management structure,” Bang said for the first time about the issue in his speech at the Kwanhun Club, three days after HYBE announced that it is “halting the acquisition process for SM Entertainment” last Sunday.

“I personally am satisfied as we were able to agree with Kakao on the matter of platform [business], an area that will be more important in the future,” said Bang.

The K-pop industry is losing the growth momentum that it saw during the Covid-19 pandemic, which means that players need to feel a sense of crisis and scale up, he emphasized.

The founder argued that the K-pop industry needs a larger, big-scale entertainment company like how “the global semiconductor market has Samsung and how the global automobile market has Hyundai,” claiming that a global entertainment company “can battle global [music] publishers and provide economies of scale for better negotiability [against large foreign publishers].”

He also emphasized the need for healthy and effective management procedures that have the ability to “continuously produce superstars,” giving HYBE’s multi-label structures that allow autonomy among each label, while utilizing the larger parent company HYBE’s power as an example of one of the ways to achieve it.

“There should be sturdier infrastructure in the [K-pop] industry that can handle repeated launches of global superstars like BTS,” Bang said.

BY CHO YONG-JUN [cho.yongjun1@joongang.co.kr]