[
THE INVESTOR] The top four accounting firms have half of the listed companies as clients, a state portal said on April 19.
According to securities information portal SEIBro, operated by the Korea Securities Depository, 108 accounting companies are handling 1,898 companies, averaging 17.6 corporate clients per firm. The industry’s top four, however, were dominant with 50.1 percent of the clients.
Samil PricewaterhouseCoopers was the strongest of them, having 295 corporate customers (15.5 percent). Samjong KPMG was next with 234 (12.5 percent), followed by Deloitte Anjin with 221 (11.6 percent). Ernst & Young Hanyoung had 200 clients (10.5 percent).
Samil’s clients include South Korea’s richest company,
Samsung Electronics, and the largest portal site,
Naver. The second-largest market cap firm,
SK hynix, Hyundai Mobis, and
Korea Electric Power Corp. are overseen by Samjong.
Anjin‘s customers include
Hyundai Motor,
SK Innovation and
Kia Motors. Hanyoung handles
Lotte Chemical and
Hana Financial Group, among others.
There were 164 accounting firms in the country as of the end of January this year. Given the latest breakdown of customers, this suggests that about 34 percent of them have no corporate clients.
By Alex Lee and newswires (
alexlee@heraldcorp.com)