HYBE reported 698.3 billion won of first-quarter revenue on 29 April 2026, its largest first quarter on record, after BTS released ARIRANG on 20 March. Album revenue nearly doubled and concert revenue fell 42.8 per cent in the same three months. We went looking for the part of the K-pop trade that does not swing with a tour calendar, and found it one layer down, in the fan platforms.
Last verified: 7 August 2026. Built from HYBE’s first-quarter 2026 earnings materials and Dear U’s own investor relations deck, then a Mirae Asset Securities company note and IFPI’s Global Music Report 2026. The HYBE quarterly split and the IFPI totals will hold. Dear U’s full-year 2025 result and the NoMus listing date are still moving, and we have marked what we could not confirm rather than printing it.
Editor’s opinion
The agency is the cyclical half of this trade
Our view is that the more interesting exposure to K-pop in 2026 is not the agency that manages BTS but the subscription layer underneath it. An agency books a record quarter when an album lands and a thin one when a tour has not started yet. A messaging platform bills every month either way.
Dear U sells a monthly subscription to hear from an artist, and ran a 33.3 per cent operating margin in 2024 against the 8.4 per cent adjusted margin HYBE managed in a quarter it called its best first quarter ever. It also carries acts from SM, Starship and CUBE, so a cold cycle at any one agency is not a cold cycle for the platform.
Against that, size. Dear U’s entire 2024 revenue of 75 billion won is about a tenth of what HYBE booked in the first quarter alone, so it cannot carry the weight in a portfolio that the agency can. In the second quarter of 2025 the company turned a 7.4 billion won operating profit into a 6.6 billion won net loss, and the distance between those two lines is not a rounding error. Its subscriber base also depends on the agencies continuing to debut acts, which makes it a derivative of the same cycle rather than a hedge against it. The view survives because the margin gap is structural rather than seasonal. A period in which paid subscriptions fall while album sales rise would end it.
Andrew Lee. This section argues a view rather than establishing a fact. It is not a forecast and not a recommendation, and the material it draws on is listed in the sources below.
What HYBE’s first quarter actually shows
The quarter is easy to misread in either direction. Consolidated revenue was 698.3 billion won, up 39.5 per cent on the same quarter of 2025 and the largest first quarter the company has filed. Album revenue did most of that work at 271.5 billion won, up 98.9 per cent, and content revenue rose 157 per cent to 105.9 billion won. BTS released its fifth studio album, ARIRANG, on 20 March 2026, and the company reported 3.98 million copies sold on the first day.
Concert revenue went the other way, down 42.8 per cent to 88.7 billion won. That is not a demand signal. The quarter closed before the world tour that follows a comeback album had begun, so the tour money has not been booked yet rather than lost. Think of the album as the invoice and the tour as the payment terms.
Adjusted operating profit was 58.5 billion won, up 170 per cent. The statutory line looked nothing like that. A one-off charge of 255.0 billion won, arising from a share gift by the largest shareholder, produced an accounting net loss of 156.7 billion won for a quarter in which the operating business grew.
No cash left the company for that 156.7 billion won, and the charge behind it is not scheduled to repeat. If you see the net loss quoted as evidence of a disappointing comeback quarter, check which line is being cited.
Demand is genre-wide, and not all of it is Korean-listed
The case for K-pop as a sector rests on demand wider than any one label. IFPI put global recorded music revenue at 31.7 billion dollars in 2025, up 6.4 per cent and past 30 billion for the first time, in an eleventh consecutive year of growth. Streaming supplied 52.4 per cent of that and grew 8.8 per cent. Four regions grew at double digits: Latin America at 17.1 per cent, the Middle East and North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa at 15.2 per cent each, and Asia at 10.9 per cent. IFPI also placed Stray Kids second behind Taylor Swift among the most successful artists of 2025.
Two results show the genre travelling without a Korean tour behind it. KATSEYE, the group HYBE America built with Geffen Records, made Billboard’s 21 Under 21 list for a second consecutive year. And Golden, from the Netflix animation KPop Demon Hunters, reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 — the ninth K-pop-associated song to do so, and the first by a female group of three or more since Destiny’s Child in 2001.
Golden is a Netflix and Sony Music project. No Korean listed company books its revenue, so read it as evidence of demand for the genre and not as a line in anyone’s accounts.
The platform layer earns a different kind of money
Dear U, listed on KOSDAQ as 376300, runs Bubble, a paid messaging service that sells subscriptions to hear from an artist. The economics are not an agency’s. In the second quarter of 2025 the company reported operating revenue of 20.2 billion won and operating profit of 7.4 billion won on its own consolidated numbers, with average paid subscriptions rising from 1.88 million in the first quarter to 2.17 million in the second. Content revenue — fonts, emoticons and the rest — rose 50 per cent quarter on quarter.
Mirae Asset Securities, in a company note dated 5 November 2025, put 2023 revenue at 76 billion won on a 38.2 per cent operating margin and 2024 at 75 billion won on 33.3 per cent. Those are the two full years we can attribute to a named house with an address we hold. The same note gave free float as 49.7 per cent. SM Entertainment is the largest shareholder and JYP Entertainment also sits on the register, which helps explain why Bubble carries acts from several agencies rather than one.
The flat line between 2023 and 2024 matters as much as the margin. Revenue did not compound over that year, so the growth case rests on subscriber additions of the kind the second quarter of 2025 showed rather than on anything already banked. If you would rather check the filings yourself than work from a broker’s table, our guide to reading Korean corporate filings in English covers how the DART portal handles a KOSDAQ company of this size.
Where the numbers stop
One figure in our working draft did not survive contact with a source. A Dear U revenue figure near 24 billion won with an operating margin above 40 per cent circulates in company briefs as a full year 2025. It cannot be a full year: the company’s own deck shows 20.2 billion won in the second quarter alone, and the Mirae Asset series has 2024 at 75 billion. Somewhere in that chain a quarter has been mistaken for a year. We do not hold the 2025 filing, so we say nothing about the year.
Three figures in this article
Who stands behind each, as at 7 August 2026
| Figure | Attributed to | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Dear U 2Q25 revenue, operating profit, subscriptions | Company investor relations deck, August 2025 | On the record |
| Dear U full-year 2025 revenue and margin | Company briefs, no filing we hold | Not confirmed — figures withheld |
| HYBE 2026 operating profit growth | Analyst estimates in reporting | Not confirmed — figure withheld |
The first row rests on a document you can open. The second contradicts the company’s own quarterly deck, so we withdrew it. The third is an estimate compounding off a base distorted by the 255.0 billion won one-off charge, which makes it close to meaningless even where the arithmetic is right. We print no number for either.
What would break this
The first is concentration. HYBE’s record quarter came from one album by one group, and that group has already been through the military service interruption once. A second such gap, or a contractual one, removes the album line that produced 271.5 billion won.
The second is China. Dear U operates a Chinese version of Bubble with Tencent Music Entertainment. We have that partnership from brokerage company briefs dated December 2025 rather than from a filing we hold, which is why you will find no subscriber number for it above. Chinese distribution for Korean cultural products has been switched off before, and the decision does not sit with either company.
The third is the comparison that fits. This looks closer to the K-beauty export story than to a semiconductor cycle: demand built on taste rather than on capacity, which is durable until it suddenly is not. Our note on why K-beauty is not peaking in America sets out how that kind of demand actually decays, and the same test applies here.
The comeback is the news. What you are actually pricing is the subscription line underneath it, which is still billing when the tour ends.
Sources
We take facts from these and write our own sentences. Where a figure originates in a company filing we say so, and where it originates in a research house estimate we name the house. We link to a document only where we hold the exact address for it; a link to a publisher’s front page would not get you to the source, so where we do not have the direct address we give you enough to find it.
Filings and official documents
- HYBE, Investor Relations, financial information, first-quarter 2026 earnings materials released 29 April 2026. Source for consolidated revenue of 698.3 billion won and its 39.5 per cent rise, album revenue of 271.5 billion won up 98.9 per cent, content revenue of 105.9 billion won up 157 per cent, concert revenue of 88.7 billion won down 42.8 per cent, adjusted operating profit of 58.5 billion won up 170 per cent, the 255.0 billion won one-off charge and the resulting 156.7 billion won accounting net loss, and for ARIRANG’s release on 20 March 2026 with 3.98 million first-day copies. Korean and English.
- Dear U, 2Q25 Business Results, company presentation. Source for second-quarter 2025 operating revenue of 20.2 billion won, operating profit of 7.4 billion won, the 6.6 billion won net loss, average paid subscriptions rising from 1.88 million to 2.17 million, and content revenue up 50 per cent quarter on quarter. English, consolidated under K-IFRS.
- IFPI, Global Music Report 2026. Source for 2025 global recorded music revenue of 31.7 billion dollars, growth of 6.4 per cent, the first passage of 30 billion dollars and the eleventh consecutive growth year, streaming at 52.4 per cent of the total growing 8.8 per cent, the four double-digit regions, and Stray Kids placing second among the most successful artists of 2025.
Research houses and reporting
- Mirae Asset Securities, Dear U company note, 5 November 2025. Source for 2023 revenue of 76 billion won at a 38.2 per cent operating margin, 2024 revenue of 75 billion won at 33.3 per cent, and free float of 49.7 per cent. The same note carries the house’s own 2025 and 2026 forecasts, which are estimates and which we do not print as results. We cite its historical series and do not reproduce the report.
- Billboard, Golden reaches number one on the Hot 100. Source for the chart position, for it being the ninth K-pop-associated song to top the chart, and for the comparison with Destiny’s Child in 2001.
- Billboard, 21 Under 21, for KATSEYE’s selection in a second consecutive year. We hold no exact address for that year’s list, so it is cited without a link.
- Korean brokerage company briefs dated December 2025, for the Tencent Music Entertainment version of Bubble. No address held. Cited as evidence of how the market is discussing the company, not as evidence that a figure is correct; no numbers are taken from it. The corporate figures behind it are confirmable only through DART.
Corrections
None yet. If you can point to a primary document that contradicts anything above, we will correct it and say what changed.
Disclosure. The author holds no position in HYBE, Dear U, SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment or NoMus as of the date of publication. This article is general information and analysis about Korean entertainment companies and the fan platform businesses attached to them. It is not investment advice, not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, and not a forecast of any price or index level. The section headed Editor’s opinion is comment: it argues a view, and we fence it off from the sourced material for that reason. We have not tailored anything here to your circumstances, and only a qualified adviser in your jurisdiction can do that. We are not registered as an investment adviser in any jurisdiction, and this site has no commercial relationship with any company, exchange or research provider named above. See the Editorial & Sourcing Policy and Disclaimer.