If K-pop is “in crisis,” as HYBE founder/chairman Bang Si-hyuk declared in March, it didn’t show in his company’s first quarter financial results released Tuesday (May 2). A nearly three-fold bump in album sales drove earnings for the South Korean music company in the first three months of the year, as it continued to demonstrate it can flourish without the BTS group activities that previously dominated its balance sheet.
HYBE recorded revenue of 410.64 billion won ($306.2 million), a jump of 44.1% from the previous year’s first quarter, with adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation) edging up 12.5% to 72.08 billion won ($53.8 million).
Company executives pointed to the combined strength of Tomorrow X Together’s The Name Chapter: Temptation, which sold 3.14 million copies in the quarter and reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200; and Seventeen’s FML, which sold 4.55 million copies in its first week (which the CEO called “an unprecedented record in K-pop history”), for generating overall album revenue of 184.29 billion won ($137.5 million) — or 45% of HYBE’s total for the quarter. Solo albums from BTS members Jimin (FACE, which sold 1.45 million units on its…
