HYBE Says It Is Building Up Markets Across Southeast Asia

HYBE, the South Korean company behind BTS, said on 3 November 2026 that it is incubating music businesses in several Southeast Asian markets. CFO Kyung-Jun Lee made the remark on the company's third-quarter earnings call, but he did not name the countries involved.

The comments answered a question from HSBC analyst Junhyun Kim, who asked about other entertainment companies launching local acts in the region. Lee said that when a company's local artists become popular in a market with large room to grow, that is a signal to build a production base there. In other words, the local popularity comes first and the base follows.

To show what that looks like, Lee pointed to two acts. He named an Indonesian artist and SB19, the Philippine group, as popular on Weverse, HYBE's fan platform. Weverse added fan communities for the P-pop groups BINI and SB19 in the second quarter of 2026.

Lee also said HYBE will not enter a local market until there is enough local entertainment industry in place. Growing local artists and building a market at the same time, he said, is a difficult task. The company already has bases in the United States, Japan, India, Latin America and elsewhere, which it uses to help artists grow internationally. Its Mumbai subsidiary opened in September 2025 as its fifth international headquarters, joining bases in Japan, the US, Latin America and China.

The financial backdrop was strong. HYBE posted record third-quarter revenue of 1.53 trillion South Korean won, about 1.08 billion US dollars. The company said a surge in concert ticket sales and merchandise linked to BTS helped drive the result, according to the earnings call transcript.

CEO Jason Jaesang Lee used the call to describe the company's approach of working across several home markets and several genres at once. He cited KATSEYE, which is based in the US, and &TEAM, which is based in Japan, as examples.

For now, the Southeast Asia plan is a set of steps rather than a list of launches. A local act gains a following, a fan community is set up, and only then does the company consider a base in that country. Any market that follows will be named by HYBE when it is ready.