"Budget Cannot Expand Indefinitely"... Kim Yoonji's Big Bet at KOCCA

Redesigning K-Content's Profit Structure with a Korean-Style Production Committee
400 Trillion Won Goal by 2030
"We Will Emerge as an Export Agency"

"Many companies hope for increased production support, but government funding cannot expand indefinitely. It is now time to go beyond simple support and pivot towards a new survival structure."

Yoonji Kim, President of the Korea Creative Content Agency, is answering questions at a press conference commemorating her 100th day in office held on the 17th at the CKL Corporate Support Center in Gwanghwamun, Jongno-gu, Seoul./Korea Creative Content Agency.

This is the conclusion reached by Kim Yoonji, President of the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), after taking office in June and closely examining the industry landscape. At a press conference celebrating her 100th day in office, held on the 17th at the CKL Enterprise Support Center in Gwanghwamun, Jongno-gu, Seoul, she highlighted the urgent crisis faced by small and medium production companies, which is often hidden behind the dazzling success of K-Content, and declared a thorough revamp of policy direction.

The core solutions are the introduction of a "Korean-style production committee" and a transition to a business system centered on intellectual property (IP). She believes that fundamental improvements to the industry's structure are unavoidable to achieve the national goals of expanding the K-Culture market to 400 trillion won and exports to 110 billion dollars by 2030.

Can K-Content Escape the Quagmire of Declining Profits?

The growth engine of Korea's content industry has markedly weakened. According to KOCCA, sales growth plummeted from 4.78% during 2018–2022 to 1.68% during 2022–2025. Over the same period, export growth shrank from 6.61% to 3.01%. Despite an elevated global status—thanks, in part, to global online video streaming services (OTT)—the profit margins of production companies have continued to decline.

President Kim emphasized, "With production costs surging, it is difficult to secure a profit margin through delivery formats that rely on platforms like Netflix. Survival now depends on connecting IP to various formats such as web novels, games, and theme parks."

The solution developed to break this deadlock is the Korean-style production committee. This system, which spread first within Japan’s media industry, involves multiple companies investing capital to distribute risk. In its early stages, it served as a stable source of funding and drove industry growth. However, as participating firms began splitting rights into smaller pieces to monopolize them, the system became extremely closed. Contracting with global OTTs or creating secondary works required unanimous consent from all participants, which ultimately hindered industry expansion.

Indeed, there is now a clear movement in Japan to escape this unreasonable ecosystem. The hit global animation "Chainsaw Man" is a prominent example: its producer MAPPA broke away from the production committee’s monopoly on profits and financed 100% of the production costs alone. By shouldering all failure risk, the company fully secured the rights to direct contracts with global platforms and additional revenue, thus overcoming the inherent limitations of the previous system.

Yoonji Kim, President of the Korea Creative Content Agency, is answering questions at a press conference commemorating the 100th day of her inauguration held on the 17th at the CKL Business Support Center in Gwanghwamun, Jongno-gu, Seoul. / Korea Creative Content Agency.

However, small and medium-sized production companies in Korea, with far less financial strength, find it difficult to take on the extreme risks of independent survival like MAPPA. They need a system where the benefits of risk-sharing are absorbed while avoiding the pitfalls of losing rights and organizational paralysis in decision-making.

President Kim announced, "KOCCA will play a neutral mediator role to lead flexible partnerships," outlining a plan to connect over 160 existing support programs, broker cross-genre expansion contracts, and match investment funds. Once detailed plans are set, a pilot project will begin to select outstanding IP and support from planning to overseas expansion. A new support scheme—Korea IP Investment Promotion Support (KIPS)—will be launched to attract investment in promising content IP, adding government funding to private investments, with 400–700 million won to be invested at each stage of growth.

A Leap Forward as a Comprehensive ‘Export Agency’ for K-Culture

KOCCA will also overhaul the engines of industrial growth and the export front by expanding the IP ecosystem. The focus will shift from direct support to more market-friendly methods such as investment and financing. To urgently ease the capital crunch, KOCCA will add a new 10 billion won pool of low-interest loans for games, animation, and music, in addition to the current 27.45 billion won policy finance base, which was previously focused on broadcasting and video. In addition, to address on-site labor shortages, next year’s youth work-experience training will be expanded to over 1,000 participants, and a large-scale research and development (R&D) project totaling 100 billion won will be promoted to support initiatives such as innovation in K-Culture live performance, led by the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology.

KOCCA will also undergo a rigorous upgrade in transparency and professionalism. The evaluation committees that select support recipients—previously plagued by allegations of unfairness—will be staffed entirely with outside experts, and the open recruitment cycle will be shortened from three years to just one. Employees will be strategically assigned to purpose-specific professional job groups such as gaming and broadcasting, in order to maximize operational expertise.

Yoonji Kim, President of the Korea Creative Content Agency, is answering questions at a press conference commemorating the 100th day of her inauguration, held on the 17th at the CKL Enterprise Support Center in Gwanghwamun, Jongno-gu, Seoul./Korea Creative Content Agency.

The single-content export strategy will be elevated into a K-Culture industrial export package that bundles related industries such as beauty and food for co-export. The permanent promotion hall "Korea 360" will be expanded to the United States and Vietnam in the first half of next year, and overseas bases will be reorganized into 10 regional centers and 18 offices. KOCCA aims to transform itself into a practical "overseas export agency," tasked not only with exhibitions but also with everything from market exploration to contract execution.

President Kim pledged, "The final 'A' in KOCCA’s English abbreviation stands for 'Agency.' We will grow content into massive IP, drive other industries, and cement KOCCA as the core export agency that creates a virtuous cycle of reinvestment in the profits generated."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.