A 2 trillion won ($1.4B) decade-long investment and a 500 billion won revenue target — expanding content, data, and commerce around a trust asset
EUGENE Group, a Korean conglomerate built on construction materials and finance, has formally declared media its next core business, pledging more than 2 trillion won (about $1.4 billion) in investment over the next decade and targeting more than 500 billion won in media revenue within five years.
Jung Han
The move comes as shrinking broadcast advertising squeezes Korea’s domestic media market — but set against where the global media industry is heading, it reads differently. Facing streaming-driven restructuring and contracting ad markets, global media groups are redefining their strongest asset — whether IP or brand — and rebuilding adjacent businesses around it. Disney is extending its IP into parks, experiences, and commerce; Paramount is absorbing Warner Bros. Discovery for scale. EUGENE Group is working from the same playbook, and has chosen trust as its axis.
Eugene ENT CEO Kang Hee-seok presents the group’s media business vision at EUGENE Group headquarters in Yeouido, Seoul, on July 9. (Photo: EUGENE Group)
Who is EUGENE Group? From confectionery to concrete to media
Little known outside Korea, EUGENE Group is a Seoul-based mid-sized conglomerate (chaebol) founded in 1954 as a confectionery business. It pivoted to ready-mixed concrete in the late 1970s and grew into the top position in Korea’s ready-mixed concrete production and construction-materials distribution, while diversifying into financial services through Eugene Investment & Securities, along with logistics and other affiliates.
The group has a history of bold portfolio moves — it once owned Hi-Mart, Korea’s largest electronics retailer, before selling it to Lotte in 2012. Its entry into media came with the acquisition of a 30.95 percent controlling stake in YTN, one of Korea’s two 24-hour all-news channels, for 320 billion won in 2024 — a deal that stirred debate in Korea over private ownership of a news broadcaster, which is why the group’s repeated pledges of editorial independence carry weight in its "Business of Trust" positioning. Media operations now run through Eugene ENT, the intermediate holding company, alongside YTN and the production facility Studio Eugenia.
Formalized at a Yeouido press briefing: "500 billion won in media revenue within five years"
Eugene ENT formalized the plan at a "EUGENE Group Media Business Vision" press briefing held July 9 at the group’s Yeouido headquarters in Seoul. To position Eugene ENT as the hub of media expansion and operations, the group will conduct a 30 billion won rights offering this year. The 2 trillion won breaks down into 1.2 trillion won for content and 800 billion won for business initiatives — additional media acquisitions in areas such as K-lifestyle, AI transformation of acquired outlets, and the creation of media and content funds. The group also set a target of more than 500 billion won in media revenue within five years across YTN, Eugene ENT, and Studio Eugenia — more than triple last year’s 140 billion won.
The strategy starts from trust. EUGENE Group has redefined media not as a content production and distribution business but as a "Business of Trust." Behind the shift is a judgment that while advertising- and fee-based revenue models weaken, the spread of generative AI and digital platforms is raising the value of verified information. The concept treats credible, verified information itself as the core asset and extends it into data, commerce, and events, anchored in guaranteeing YTN’s editorial independence.
The K-lifestyle media outlet the group is actively pursuing would become another pillar of this trust-based business. Its reference model is Penske Media Corporation (PMC), which grew a diversified business around trusted brands through Billboard and the content festival South by Southwest (SXSW). "Building on the trust assets EUGENE Group holds, we will construct a media-based comprehensive platform that provides content and data on Korean industries and connects capital with global networks," CEO Kang Hee-seok said at the briefing, adding that the YTN acquisition was itself the starting point of the strategy.
In an earlier JoongAng Ilbo interview, Kang also pointed to De Beers, which held its customers through the "A Diamond Is Forever" positioning amid market shifts, and IBM, which survived by transforming from a hardware maker into a services company on the strength of client trust — arguing that media companies should stop merely competing with YouTube and OTT platforms and instead identify and extend their greatest asset.
Eugene ENT, the intermediate holding company for EUGENE Group’s media division. (Photo: EUGENE Group)
YTN headquarters in Sangam-dong, Seoul. EUGENE Group acquired a 30.95 percent stake for 320 billion won in 2024. (Photo: EUGENE Group)
Disney’s $60 billion, Paramount’s $110 billion, Sky–ITV: where global media is heading
The approach tracks moves already underway among global media groups. Disney is executing a plan to invest roughly $60 billion over ten years in its Experiences segment — theme parks, cruise lines, and consumer products — nearly double what it spent in the previous decade. With streaming competition eroding traditional media economics, the strategy converts a century of accumulated IP and brand affinity into parks, experiences, and commerce.
In U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, Disney noted that for every park guest today, it counts more than ten consumers with Disney affinity who do not visit in a given year — a way of translating brand equity into unreached demand, and structurally the same logic Kang applies when he frames trust as an expandable asset.
Projection-mapping preparations at Cinderella Castle, Magic Kingdom. Disney is investing $60 billion in its Experiences segment over ten years. (Photo: still from The Walt Disney Company video)
Consolidation points the same way. Paramount Skydance, after outbidding Netflix, agreed to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for roughly $110 billion including debt; the deal cleared the U.S. Justice Department last month, putting integration on track for this year.
Comcast, moving in the opposite direction, spun off its cable networks into Versant — which promptly paid $530 million for golf-simulator company Full Swing, using Golf Channel as a funnel into a vertical golf ecosystem of content, commerce, training, and data: a shift from monetizing the channel itself to monetizing the assets the channel aggregates, as K-EnterTech Hub has reported. Expanding or shedding, the common denominator holds: in a shrinking advertising market, redefine your strongest asset and rebuild around it. For Disney that asset is IP; for Penske Media, its brands; for EUGENE Group, trust.
A Full Swing golf simulator. Versant, spun off from Comcast, acquired Full Swing for $530 million to build a vertical golf ecosystem. (Photo: still from Full Swing video)
Sky announced its agreement to acquire ITV Media & Entertainment on July 6. (Image: Sky Group)
In Europe, the reshuffle is now winning regulatory approval as well. Comcast-owned Sky agreed on July 6 to acquire ITV Media & Entertainment — the broadcasting and streaming operations of Britain’s largest commercial free-to-air broadcaster — for up to £1.6 billion, structured as £1.2 billion in cash plus Love Productions and up to £0.2 billion in performance-related earn-out. The production arm ITV Studios stays a standalone listed company, with Sky entering a £2.1 billion five-year content supply agreement upon completion.
Combined, the business would account for about 20 percent of all in-home viewing in the UK — second to the BBC and ahead of YouTube — with roughly £200 million in annual cost synergies projected by year three. Two days later, the BBC said it was in talks with Channel 4 to combine their streaming offerings into a British "sovereign platform" against U.S.-backed services.
In Germany, RTL’s acquisition of Sky Deutschland received unconditional European Commission approval and closed June 1, while the Berlusconi family’s MediaForEurope has taken control of ProSiebenSat.1, building a pan-European broadcast group spanning Italy and Spain. After nearly two decades of blocking broadcaster tie-ups, The Hollywood Reporter observes, European regulators have begun treating global streamers and digital advertising giants — not TV consolidation — as the primary threat to competition.
France has taken a different route: TF1 struck a distribution partnership last month placing its five live channels and more than 30,000 hours of programming inside Netflix’s interface, while public broadcaster France Télévisions partnered with Amazon’s Prime Video. Merge or move in with the platforms — the diagnosis is the same: national-scale operations alone no longer suffice. K-EnterTech Hub has noted the contrast with Korea, where ownership regulations block the very capital restructuring the UK is now embracing, leaving broadcasters in crisis without an exit. EUGENE Group’s YTN acquisition stands as a rare capital-reshuffle case in that closed market — and its decision to aim beyond its borders from the outset, with K82 and a global platform ambition, answers the same pressure.
From airwaves to space: Tokyo Dream Park — and a warning from Sun Valley
Japanese broadcasters were early to another translation of the same logic: turning IP into physical space. TV Asahi opened Tokyo Dream Park in March in Tokyo’s Ariake district — a nine-story, roughly 46,500-square-meter complex built by Shimizu Corporation — with the full building, including its immersive art floor, opening June 12. The facility stacks a concert hall for about 5,000 (SGC Hall), a 1,500-seat EX Theater, a ‘100% Doraemon & Friends’ exhibition with more than 100 life-size figures, and Japan’s first outpost of French company Culturespaces’ immersive ‘Lumières’ art — some 100 Epson projectors washing Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ across walls and floors — while life-size golden statues of Shohei Ohtani, priced at 55 million yen apiece, greet visitors at the second-floor entrance.
Roughly 300,000 visitors came in the first month, 1.5 times the target, against an annual goal of 2 million; a 10,000-seat Toyota Arena opens nearby in October, binding Tokyo Bay into a single entertainment district. Nippon TV brought Studio Ghibli in as a subsidiary in 2023; TBS is redeveloping Akasaka into an entertainment city, converting its ACT Theater into a dedicated ‘Harry Potter’ venue; TV Tokyo posted record results on overseas game royalties from Naruto and Boruto.
The direction is one and the same: put content and IP at the center, demote broadcasting to a distribution vehicle, and shift from selling view time on screens to selling dwell time in spaces, as this correspondent reported on site for MediaGPT. In the U.S., too, as theme parks polarize between Disney/Universal mega-resorts and closing regional parks, irreplaceable fandom — from Dollywood to the ‘Squid Game’ experiences at Netflix House — is emerging as the survival variable for physical space, K-EnterTech Hub has observed.
Tokyo Dream Park in Ariake, Tokyo — TV Asahi’s nine-story entertainment complex. (Photo: Tokyo Dream Park)
Inside Tokyo Dream Park, where concert halls, exhibitions, and immersive art stack floor by floor. (Photo: Tokyo Dream Park)
Scale itself, however, guarantees nothing. This week in Idaho, Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley conference — the so-called summer camp for billionaires — convenes Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Paramount’s David Ellison, Comcast’s Brian Roberts, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, among others.
The retreat that incubated Disney–ABC, Time Warner–AOL, and Yahoo–Verizon has a checkered record: Variety notes that many of those unions chased scale they could not sustain, left the industry saddled with debt, and that even Sun Valley-born Comcast–NBCUniversal is now being unwound — concluding that "the best deal may be the one you didn’t make." What separates winners from wreckage is not size but which asset sits at the center and what gets connected to it. That is precisely why EUGENE Group’s bet begins not with an acquisition list but with the definition of an asset: trust.
An overseas execution card: the ‘K82’ pilot with Sinclair
Eugene ENT CEO Kang Hee-seok (left) and Del Parks, President of Technology at Sinclair, after signing a strategic MOU on K-content’s entry into the U.S. media market, at NAB Show in Las Vegas on April 19. (Photo: EUGENE Group)
One execution card in the global push is U.S. terrestrial broadcasting. Sinclair announced a strategic collaboration among its subsidiary CAST.ERA Networks (CEN), EUGENE Group, and YTN to pursue the K82 pilot, intended to become the first U.S. terrestrial broadcast channel dedicated to Korean content. The pilot is planned to launch in the Washington, D.C./Baltimore market on Sinclair’s NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) infrastructure, with EUGENE Group and YTN serving as strategic partners in a shared market-development effort.
The collaboration traces back to a strategic MOU on K-content’s entry into the U.S. media market, signed by Eugene ENT/YTN and Sinclair/CAST.ERA at NAB Show in Las Vegas on April 19. Then, on June 23 in Washington, D.C., the EUGENE Group/YTN delegation, joined by Sinclair and CEN executives, held back-to-back meetings with Sinclair senior leadership, leadership of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), and officials from the FCC’s Media Bureau, discussing a content-driven adoption model for ATSC 3.0, expanded multilingual broadcasting, and enhanced emergency communications. The partners plan to present K82 at NAB Show New York, October 21–22, at the Javits Center, as a live case study of content-led NextGen TV adoption and U.S.–Korea media cooperation.
K82 will deliver K-pop, Korean cultural, entertainment, and lifestyle programming plus interactive shopping to U.S. viewers free over the air, drawing on NextGen TV capabilities such as enhanced picture and audio, interactive services, datacasting, and advanced emergency alerting. "Compelling content is one of the strongest drivers of NextGen TV adoption," said Del Parks, President of Technology at Sinclair.
Stanley Park, CTO of CAST.ERA Networks and Executive Director of the K82 Initiative, called K82 "an opportunity to build a stronger bridge between Korea and the United States through innovation in both technology and content." Still, K82 is a pilot to be evaluated against agreed performance milestones before commercial discussions and expansion into additional U.S. markets — one of several execution cards in the group’s media strategy, whose main line remains the trust-anchored expansion into content, data, and commerce.
A vertical stack: production, journalism, global distribution
Inside a large-scale stage at Studio Eugenia in Paju, where Netflix’s “Culinary Class Wars” was produced. (Photo: EUGENE Group)
EUGENE Group’s media and content portfolio: YTN, YTN Radio, YTN dmb, Eugene ENT, YTN Seoul Tower, and Studio Eugenia. (Source: EUGENE Group website)
Combined with Studio Eugenia in Paju — producer of Netflix’s "Culinary Class Wars," which the group plans to develop into a K-content creation hub — and YTN’s strengthened data and newsgathering capability, overseas distribution channels like K82 would give EUGENE Group a vertical stack linking content production, trust-based journalism, and global distribution.
The portfolio even includes YTN Seoul Tower, operator of Namsan’s N Seoul Tower — which has become a pilgrimage site for global fans since featuring prominently in Netflix’s animated hit ‘KPop Demon Hunters.’ Netflix-born fandom spilling into dwell time in a physical space: the very formula Japan’s broadcasters proved with buildings is already at work inside the group’s own portfolio.
Namsan’s N Seoul Tower
Just as Japan’s broadcasters translated IP into buildings, the next thing to watch is what touchpoints EUGENE Group’s data, commerce, and events ambitions will translate trust into. "Interest in K-pop and K-beauty has exploded, but overseas there is a shortage of information that explains Korean culture and industry objectively," Kang said. "Becoming a catalyst for Korea’s key industries and K-culture on a foundation of trust, and growing the media market itself beyond the boundaries of the domestic advertising market — that is the 100-year media company EUGENE Group envisions."
Sources
· Eugene ENT, "EUGENE Group Media Business Vision" press briefing (July 9, 2026, EUGENE Group headquarters, Yeouido, Seoul)
· JoongAng Ilbo, interview with Eugene ENT CEO Kang Hee-seok (Ha Nam-hyun, July 9, 2026) — joongang.co.kr/article/25443782
· Money Today, report on EUGENE Group’s 2 trillion won media investment plan (Jung Jin-woo, July 10, 2026)
· Financial News, report on EUGENE Group’s planned K-lifestyle media acquisition (Kim Hyun-chul, July 9, 2026)
· Sinclair / CAST.ERA Networks / EUGENE Group / YTN, press release on the K82 pilot initiative collaboration (2026, Hunt Valley, MD)
· The Walt Disney Company, $60 billion ten-year Experiences investment plan (SEC filings and company announcements, 2023–2024)
· Paramount Skydance–Warner Bros. Discovery merger agreement (announced February 2026) and U.S. Department of Justice clearance (June 2026)
· The Hollywood Reporter, "The Get-Big-or-Die Era of European TV Has Arrived" (Scott Roxborough, July 8, 2026) — Sky–ITV deal, RTL–Sky Deutschland, TF1–Netflix partnership
· Variety, "Buyer Beware: Why Sun Valley Has Been a Disaster for the Media Business" (Brent Lang, July 7, 2026)
· MediaGPT on-site reportage from Tokyo Dream Park, "From Airwaves to Space" (June 2026, published on kentertechhub.com) — synthesizing TV Asahi press releases, Nikkan Sports, Impress Watch, Nikkei, and other Japanese coverage
· K-EnterTech Hub (kentertechhub.com): "Sky to Acquire ITV Media & Entertainment for Up to £1.6 Billion" (July 6, 2026) · "Why Did a Broadcaster Pay $530 Million for a Golf Simulator Company?" (July 7, 2026) · "The Future of K-Content Is the Global Fandom Park" (July 8, 2026)
· Sky Group announcement, "Sky agrees to acquire ITV Media & Entertainment" (July 6, 2026, skygroup.sky)
· EUGENE Group corporate history and company profiles (eugenes.co.kr and public filings)