Nineteen percent of the companies that exported anything from Korea last year had never exported before, and between them they shipped 1 percent of the money
Nineteen thousand seven hundred and forty six companies in Korea exported something in 2025 having exported nothing in the three years before it.
That is the count the Korea Customs Service published at nine on Monday morning in Seoul, and it is up 3.7 percent on 2024. The agency calls it the largest within the last five years. Read the table underneath and the phrase is doing careful work: the series runs 20,303 in 2020, then a collapse to 17,172 in 2021, then four years of climbing back to 19,746. Korea has not yet returned to where it was six years ago.
The same is true of the money. First-time exporters shipped $6.9bn, up 13.2 percent and the most since 2019. In 2019 the figure was $7.2bn.
The ratio the release puts in brackets
Two numbers sit next to each other on the second page and they are the story.
First-time exporters were 19.4 percent of every company that exported from Korea last year. Their shipments were 1.0 percent of corporate export value.
That is not a criticism of them and the agency does not present it as one. It is arithmetic about size. The average first-time exporter shipped $350,000 across the year. The 15,885 companies that shipped under $100,000, four fifths of the total, averaged $20,000 each. Eight in ten sent goods to exactly one country, and seven in ten sold exactly one product heading.
Count and value point in different directions
By number of companies, the leading products were machinery and computers at 10.9 percent, electrical goods at 8.5 percent, cosmetics at 7.0 percent, plastics at 6.7 percent and motor vehicles at 5.6 percent.
By value the order changes completely. Precious metals came first at 26.4 percent, $1,822m of it, shipped by 393 companies. Motor vehicles were second at 19.9 percent. Machinery and computers, the largest category by headcount with 3,751 exporters, accounted for 7.0 percent of the value at $485m.
Destinations split the same way. China took the most first-time exporters, 14.0 percent of them. Hong Kong took the most value, 30.0 percent. The release does not say what was shipped to Hong Kong.
The release is a deeper cut of the agency's corporate trade activity statistics for 2025, published on 30 April.
