The Top K-pop Merch Markets Are Not Korea

Treat the K-pop merchandise market as a Korean market and you are reading the map upside down.

In K-pop category data published by one global commerce platform, lightsticks ranked first in Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines and Mexico. None of those is Korea. Albums carrying video-call event entries ranked first in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.

Over the same period, merchandise revenue at Korea's four major agencies climbed to 1.1 trillion won. A large share of that money came from the countries on this list.

At a glance

No country tops more than one row, and that is the finding. Vietnam leads on lightsticks but not on revenue; Thailand looks longest but Malaysia pays most. A single 'Southeast Asian K-pop market' does not exist in this table — five different ones do.

What this data is, and how far to trust it

The source first. The rankings above come from a commerce platform widely used across Southeast Asia, compiling its own K-pop category transactions (2023). It is not a government statistic and not an industry-wide census.

The limits follow from that. The platform is strong in some markets and weak in others. If fans in a given country mostly use other channels — official global stores, local physical retail, group orders — that country's number comes in below reality. Japan and the United States not appearing here should be read that way: not that they do not buy, but that they do not buy here.

For readers outside the region, the platform in question is a Southeast Asian marketplace of the kind that dominates online retail there — closer in role to what Amazon occupies in the United States than to a specialist fan store. That matters for interpretation: these are not numbers from a K-pop boutique, they are numbers from the place people already buy household goods. Fandom purchasing in these markets runs through mainstream commerce rather than a separate niche channel, which is itself a difference from how K-pop merchandise is usually bought in North America and Europe.

What makes the data useful is not the ranking itself but that countries were compared inside a single platform. Measured under the same conditions, relative size across countries is trustworthy even where the absolute level is not.

One more caution: this is 2023 data. The 2025–2026 market sizes discussed below use a different basis, so do not multiply or splice the two together.

Three metrics point at three different countries

But the leader changes depending on which metric you pick up.

Condensed: Thailand looks longest, Malaysia and the Philippines spend most, Vietnam and Thailand grow fastest.

Dwell time and revenue diverging is common. Looking longer can mean higher interest — and it can equally mean taking longer to decide whether to buy at all. The more friction there is around price, shipping cost or payment methods, the longer the page stays open.

The split by item type matters too. A lightstick is something you carry to a show; a video-call event album buys a moment with the artist. That different markets lead on each means K-pop fans in different countries put their money at different points in the same fandom.

The same map appears in Korean company filings

If the platform data is from 2023, how far that trend has travelled since can be checked against listed Korean companies.

• Big-four merchandise revenue reached 1.1 trillion won in 2025, up more than 40%
• The 2026 market is forecast at 1.6 trillion won
• YG's Q1 2026 merchandise revenue was 65.3 billion won, more than double its concert revenue (30.9 billion)
• SM's Q2 saw recorded music fall while merchandise and licensing rose 22.0%

Once merchandise is this large, which market receives stock first becomes a real operating decision, and the basis for that decision is a ranking like the one above. How lightstick pricing is constructed is in the cost structure behind a 40,000 won lightstick; the company-side numbers are in SM's Q2 results.

What this means where you are

One channel not in the table is used constantly in practice: group ordering. One person orders on behalf of many and splits the shipment — Korean fandoms call it gonggu. It began as a way to share shipping cost and minimum order quantities, and in Southeast Asian fandoms it has grown to cover currency exchange and customs handling as well. It is cheaper, but the seller is a private individual, so there is nobody to escalate to when something goes wrong. If it is your first purchase, buying once through an official channel to establish a baseline price is the safer sequence.

For readers in Vietnam and Thailand the last row applies most. Both are in the high-growth group, which also means distribution is not fully settled there yet: official channels and private sellers are mixed, and price variance is wide. Checking whether a seller is an official store or an individual before you buy is where the real saving is.

And the largest fact in this data is not the ranking. The centre of the K-pop merchandise market already sits outside Korea, and a large part of that centre is Southeast Asia.

Read next

• The cost structure behind a 40,000 won lightstick — the item that ranks first on this list
• SM's Q2 results and 13 comebacks — the quarter merchandise covered for albums
• The photocard resale market — what gets added on top of list price
• What it takes for a plush toy to cross a border — distribution on the character side, not K-pop

Sources

• Shopee — K-pop category sales data
• Ten Asia — The trillion-won K-pop merch era: what is your fandom worth?
• NewsToday — Behind sold-out concerts: the fandom assets separating HYBE, SM, JYP and YG