In 1901 King Camp Gillette worked out that the money was not in the razor but in the blade you had to keep buying. The most profitable businesses in the world have some version of that blade — a part of the chain they alone control, and can charge for again and again. This is a story about a company that did the opposite. It bought the whole chain, link by link, until it owned almost everything a chicken touches between the egg and the supermarket shelf. And at the end of all that owning, it earns less than one won on every hundred it takes in.
The company is Harim — Korea's largest poultry group, and the name on roughly one in five chickens eaten in the country. From a smart factory in Iksan it raises, feeds, hatches, slaughters, cuts and packs at a scale no domestic rival comes close to. By its own count it holds about 20.4% of the market and ranks first, ahead of some forty competitors. On paper it is the textbook vertically integrated champion. In its accounts it is something stranger: a market leader that, over more than a decade, has barely made money at all.
Average operating margin across 54 quarters of trading
0.6%
The lowest of any company in Korea's top-500 food sector, by CEO Score's tally — and this is the industry's clear number one.
The most integrated chicken machine in the country
Start with what Harim actually owns, because the list is the point. It mills its own feed — roughly 540,000 tonnes a year. It runs four hatcheries that turn out around 140 million chicks. It places those chicks with about 600 contract farms, which raise some 85% of its birds. It slaughters up to 630,000 birds a day — 400,000 of them through the ₩250 billion automated plant in Iksan, opened in 2019 and among the most advanced in Asia, plus another 230,000 at a second site in Jeongeup. And it processes 200 tonnes of meat a day into roughly 350 packaged products. Egg to shelf, Harim's hand is on almost every step.
