One piece a week, taking apart one industry's profit and loss with material anyone can open. Audit reports from 38,990 externally audited companies, a full census of 27,908 gyms, seven weeks of Olive Young shelves. We don't count the data as it arrives; we rebuild it against the original documents before writing a number. We also mark where public data goes blind. Past that point only a company's own data can measure it, and that is our work.
A new piece weekly
Six of eight brand companies had the same condition. The press named a surge in marketing spend as the cause. Nowhere was there evidence that anyone had measured whether the money produced incremental revenue.
Read →Traditional liquor is the rare Korean drinks category permitted to sell online. Yet only one of six producers runs a storefront of its own. For the other five, every order record accumulates on someone else's platform.
Read →Filings break revenue out by sales channel — but every company that discloses it bundles its own storefront with third-party marketplaces into one "online" line. The own-channel share appears nowhere, and that boundary decides whose database the customer ends up in.
Read →Korea's full manufacturing registry shows about 380 new food products born every day — and no way to count the ones that die. So I measured the age of the survivors: shelf clocks differ almost ninefold by product type.
Read →Seven weekly snapshots of Olive Young's category rankings. The skincare cluster trades brands at 1.2–1.4× chance while every path into makeup sits below half of chance — getting on a shelf and widening it are different events.
Read →Korea publishes prescription data by ingredient, dose, district and month — 2,340 API applications in ten years, and not one public analysis I could find. Using it directly showed: combinations crossed half the market, and the best-selling drug's dose demand and product lineup diverge by 18 points.
Read →All fifteen fashion brands had their auditor name inventory valuation a key audit matter. That inventory is 30% of revenue sitting for 299 days — yet days-of-inventory, the only gauge available from outside, correlates with the write-down rate companies actually booked at +0.002.
Read →Seoul's coffee sales fell 11.9% in two years — transactions fell 18.6%, and an 8.2% price rise papered over half of it. The median neighbourhood's coffee shop rings up thirty-one payments a day. Only 23 of 384 neighbourhoods grew both customers and per-shop earnings — and neither Gangnam-daero, Hongdae nor Seongsu made the list.
Read →Chase the neighbourhoods where sales run high, and the rent is higher by exactly that much — the burden ratio stays flat (+0.01). Low-closure neighbourhoods aren't safe; they're places nobody opens in — the only thing closure tracks is opening (+0.45). And industry explains 37% of closures; neighbourhood, just 4%.
Read →We opened the public records of 85 consumer, F&B and hospitality companies and counted the paths along which one customer splits into separate ledgers. 84 of 85 (99%) had at least one. Fragmentation is layered — median two layers, two in five carry three or more — which is why one system never fixes it.
Read →Seven weeks of Olive Young shelf prices. The usual suspicion — that list prices are padded to manufacture a discount — did not survive: they held steady for 96.2% of products and matched the undiscounted week's real selling price to the won 97.2% of the time. What that makes visible: 1,833 of 6,630 products (27.6%) have zero observations of themselves at that price. Discount depth does not separate them either — both groups sit at a median of 20.0%.
Read →Five-year survival counted from the licence register of 27,908 Korean gyms. 82.6% are still there — but that is a ceiling: places that closed without filing stay on the register as "operating." And the average hides where the risk actually sits — not with the newly opened, but with gyms a few years in.
Read →Every published minimum winning score from Cheongyak Home: 28 Seoul private-apartment notices over twelve months, 27 with published cut-offs, 214 units. The median cut-off was 64 points — not a coincidence, but exactly the maximum a three-person household can reach. At 60 points barely one in five units (22%) had its door open; at 50, four in a hundred. Even a maxed four-person household at 69 found 15% closed — and more than half of those doors were in a single district, Seocho.
Read →The Korean personas refused to answer 12 times out of 12; the American personas insisted on the same answer 8 times out of 8 with no evidence at all — opposite failure modes. One line opened the door: "in the last election, you voted for X." A Korean local-election backtest reached 2.65 points of error in battlegrounds. Everyone uses the same models — what differs is the design of the data you inject, and the same rule carries straight into CRM message testing.
Read →Ad spend and sales, two years apiece, pulled from the audit reports of 71 e-commerce companies among Korea's 38,990 audited firms. Companies that raised ad spend by more than 20% grew a median +0.9% in e-commerce and +15.8% in cosmetics; those that cut, −17.8% and −5.4%. The sensitivity to advertising cannot be told apart from cosmetics — the curve simply sits eleven points lower. In this industry advertising is a maintenance cost.
Read →Book profit next to cash in the bank for 348 profitable Korean consumer companies in 5 industries, from their audit reports. Above a 12% margin, a company that writes 100 of profit in the books receives 72 in the bank. Which company does it changes every year (two-year correlation −0.15). What makes it is not growth but advertising and other people's channels: spend over 10% of sales on ads and sell through others' channels, and 44% see cash leave the bank in a profitable year.
Read →Three years of audit reports for 314 Korean consumer companies, 628 company-years. In years advertising was cut by more than 20%, operating profit rose at 55% of companies, the same as the 48% in years it was left alone. Advertising moves 1.7% of sales while operating profit moves 4.3%: the business, not the advertising, sets the direction of profit. Companies that cut more than 5% of sales gave up 12.4% of sales.
Read →Only figures verified against the original source. Secondary aggregates and press summaries are never used as headline numbers, and no comparison is drawn without stating standalone or consolidated basis.
The limits come first. Public sources cannot establish incrementality, contribution profit by channel, or repeat purchase. What follows is a hypothesis, not a measurement.
No sector is being written off. These industries were broadly having a good year. What diverged was execution, company by company.
Lambency uses public data to diagnose where to look, and internal data to test whether it holds.
If you want to know what the same method turns up on your own numbers.
caffrey.w.lee@gmail.com