"K-Content Should Be Developed as the Second Semiconductor Industry"

While the trade balance has continued to show a deficit trend since March last year, exports related to K-content recorded an all-time high surplus, playing a role in improving the trade balance.

On the 28th, the Korea Economic Research Institute announced that the export value of the content industry last year was $13.01 billion, a 1.5% increase compared to the previous year. It grew at an average annual rate of 11.6% from 2016 to 2022. This significantly surpassed exports of representative export items such as home appliances ($8.05 billion) and electric vehicles ($9.82 billion). It also recorded export performance more than 30% higher than that of secondary batteries ($9.99 billion), which the government has intensively supported. The trade surplus related to K-content was $1.235 billion, the highest record since related statistics began in 2006.

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Last year, domestic content industry sales and employment were recorded at 146.9 trillion won and approximately 657,000 people, increasing by 7.6% and 1.6% respectively compared to the previous year. Korea’s content market size entered the global top 7 (as of 2022, Korea Creative Content Agency). The surplus scale stood out in the fields of games ($8.36053 billion), music ($761.24 million), and broadcasting ($657.24 million). On the other hand, advertising (-$83.48 million), film ($5.14 million), and comics ($7.44 million) remained at minimal levels.

Currently, the limitations of K-content can be pointed out as regional and sectoral biases. As of 2020, 71.5% of content exports were concentrated in the Asian region. More than half of the total export value came from games, indicating a high regional and sectoral bias in the content industry. Additionally, the 2023 genre-specific support budget of the Korea Creative Content Agency, a government budget, was also concentrated in specific fields such as broadcasting and video (119.2 billion won), games (61.2 billion won), and music (30.8 billion won).

On the other hand, sectors with large shares in the content industry such as knowledge information (27.8%) and advertising (21.4%) are currently led by advanced English-speaking countries. Although Korean companies are performing well in fields like games, music, and film, these account for only about 10% of the global content market. This is why there are calls for expanded support for sectors with poor export performance such as advertising, animation, and publishing.

Seungseok Lee, a senior researcher at the Korea Economic Research Institute, advised, “The content industry should be developed into a leading export industry to minimize the trade deficit and use it as an opportunity to overcome the economic recession.” He added, “For Korea’s content industry to stably enter the world’s top 5 rankings, an ecosystem must be created so that high-quality content can be smoothly distributed in the market. The government should protect intellectual property rights (IP) at the national level to ensure that K-content creations are properly recognized for their value and that their rights and authority are guaranteed.”

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