KOSDAQ Tiering System Delayed Again Amid VC Industry Pushback
Announcement of the detailed KOSDAQ tiering system has been delayed once more amid pushback from the venture capital industry. Regulators had originally planned to unveil the final restructuring direction at the event marking KOSDAQ's 30th anniversary and signaled implementation next year, before pushing the detailed announcement back to September-October following an August public hearing. However, even that public hearing has yet to take place, making a September-October announcement unlikely and raising concerns that next year's implementation itself has become uncertain.
The venture capital industry has pushed back, arguing that classifying companies into tiers based solely on financial performance metrics such as market capitalization, revenue, and operating profit would relegate biotech, AI, and other companies with long R&D cycles to lower tiers, stigmatizing them. The argument is that it is unfair to brand a company as substandard simply because it has not yet turned a profit.
Park Si-dong noted that letting policy drift and stall is itself the worst outcome. He pointed out that the tiering system, which divides KOSDAQ into three tiers — Premium, Standard, and Management — is structurally bound to draw opposition both from companies that fail to reach the top tier and from the venture capital firms that invested in them. He noted that the original system Japan introduced was designed to encourage companies to change, but the Korean-style tiering system has failed to capture that intent and merely stigmatizes companies through classification, stressing the need to redesign the system to actually drive change.