The Sugar That Paid for Parasite
When "Parasite" won Best Picture in 2020, a woman came to the microphone whom almost nobody in the room recognised. Twenty-five years earlier she had begun creating the conditions for it — with a sugar refinery. And the state helped, in a way rarely named as such in Europe.
The moment is on record. Bong Joon-ho had just collected his fourth Oscar of the evening, the orchestra started up, and the applause began that pushes winners off the stage. Then Tom Hanks called from the audience for the lights to be brought back up. Miky Lee stepped to the microphone, vice chairwoman of CJ Group.
Where the money came from
In 1938 Lee Byung-chul founded a trading company in Daegu called Samsung. Fifteen years later, in 1953, he set up its first factory: CheilJedang, a sugar and flour refinery. Korea lay in ruins after the war and was importing sugar.
That sugar factory became CJ. The name is the abbreviation.
Miky Lee was born in 1958 in Knoxville, Tennessee, the eldest grandchild of the founder. Her father Lee Maeng-hee was his eldest son — and was passed over in the succession. When the grandfather died in 1987, Samsung went to the third son. The overlooked eldest received the sugar factory and handed it to his children in 1993.
The investment that severed everything
In 1995 Miky Lee persuaded the group to put 300 million dollars into a newly founded American studio: DreamWorks SKG. CheilJedang received Asian distribution rights in return, Japan excluded.
The part rarely told: Samsung had been negotiating with DreamWorks itself. That deal collapsed. Her success with the same company was therefore a declaration — and the occasion to unwind the remaining cross-holdings. By 1996 they were untangled, CheilJedang stood as a group of its own, and Miky Lee founded CJ Entertainment. Three years later CJ opened Korea's first multiplex cinema.
A sugar refinery breaks away from the country's largest conglomerate because the heiress wants to invest in Hollywood.
The third party: the state
Conglomerate and market are two pillars. The third is the one Europe overlooks longest: the Korean state runs cultural export as economic policy. Not as cultural stewardship — as foreign trade.
This is not interpretation, it is in the justifications. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism justifies its Hallyu budget expressly by reference to "export-led economic development". Culture there is a line in the trade balance.
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Ministry of Culture annual budget, 2025 | 7.07 trillion won ≈ 4.9 billion $ |
| Policy financing, content industry 2021 | 504 billion won |
| The same in 2024 | 1.74 trillion won |
| Content exports 2022 | 13.2 billion $ |
| Target for 2027 | 25 billion $ |
| Austrian film funding, federal 2026 | ≈ 91 million € |
Policy financing for the content industry more than tripled in three years. The stated goal: to reach fourth place in global content production by 2027, after the United States, China and Japan. Added to this are tax deductions for production costs, a fund designed to attract foreign investors, a network of Korean Cultural Centres in dozens of countries — and since 2024 a dedicated act promoting the Hallyu industry.
In Korea culture is an export good with a target. Here it is a cultural asset with a budget.
The root lies in the Asian financial crisis. When Korea's economy collapsed in 1997, the country looked for export goods that required no factories. What came of it is now state doctrine across changes of government.
Comparing this with Austria is not about the amounts. It is about the intention. Austrian film funding is cultural policy: it is meant to secure diversity and quality and sustain the location. It is not built to improve a trade balance, and nobody expects that of it. That is a legitimate choice — but it explains why the two systems cannot be compared by placing figures side by side.
What occupies Korea now
Looking at Korea from Europe, one mostly sees the ascent. In Seoul the conversation is about something else.
In 2025 box office revenue fell twelve per cent and admissions by almost fourteen. The market share of Korean films collapsed — foreign productions now hold around sixty per cent of revenue, a reversal of the long-standing pattern. Admissions are almost forty-five per cent below 2019. Streaming has changed viewing habits, in Korea faster than elsewhere.
What is growing is export: international sales of completed Korean films rose in 2025 to just over fifty million dollars, a fifth more than the year before. The growth markets lie in Asia.
And what follows from it
No model can be ordered from this story. It rests on a family conglomerate with a business able to cross-subsidise cultural investment, on an inheritance dispute that freed the company in the first place, and on one person willing to act. None of that can be arranged.
What can be read from it is something else: that a small country with a language almost nobody speaks can become the second largest origin of streaming content — when capital, market and state work in the same direction.
How this compares with the Austrian position, what sums are involved and why the two systems measure by different standards, we treat separately.