HYBE, the South Korea-headquartered entertainment company behind BTS, has posted the highest quarterly revenues and operating profit in its history.
According to HYBE’s earnings release, published on Tuesday (November 3), the company generated KRW 1.53 trillion (approximately USD $1.08 billion) in revenue in Q3 2026.
That was up 109.8% YoY and 5.2% QoQ, beating the KRW 1.45 trillion record HYBE set in the second quarter.
Q3 2026 was the first quarter in which HYBE’s revenues, converted into US dollars, topped $1 billion. HYBE first passed KRW 1 trillion in Q2, but with a weaker won at the time, that quarter’s revenues converted to around $967 million.
Operating profit reached KRW 188.5 billion ($133m), up 10.3% QoQ, with an operating margin of 12.4%.
A year earlier, in Q3 2025, HYBE posted an operating loss of KRW 42.2 billion.
Concert revenue hit a quarterly record of KRW 726.8 billion ($512m), up 196.7% YoY and 12.2% QoQ, led by the European and US legs of BTS’s ARIRANG world tour.
HYBE said BTS averaged around 70,000 fans per show in the quarter.
HYBE’s Q3 concert revenue alone was equivalent to around 95% of the KRW 763.9 billion it generated from concerts across the whole of 2025.
Merchandise and licensing revenue set its own quarterly record, rising 98.7% YoY and 7.7% QoQ to KRW 334.6 billion ($236m).
That included KRW 107 billion ($75m) from merchandise sold at BTS’s North American tour dates during the quarter.
HYBE’s investor presentation said around 2 million merchandise units were sold across the whole North American run, covering 31 BTS shows in 12 cities between April and September.
Recorded music revenue fell 13.4% QoQ to KRW 282.8 billion ($199m), but was up 49.0% YoY.
Streaming accounted for approximately 30% of recorded music revenue, according to HYBE.
ENHYPEN’s eighth mini album THE SIN : BLISS topped the Billboard 200, while cumulative sales of CORTIS’s second EP GREENGREEN passed 4 million copies in September.
HYBE’s net profit fell 89.7% QoQ to KRW 11.3 billion ($8m), from KRW 109.8 billion in Q2.
Net profit attributable to HYBE’s controlling interest was a loss of KRW 6.8 billion.
The company booked KRW 142.8 billion in non-operating expenses in Q3, up from KRW 43.7 billion in Q2. HYBE CFO Kyung-Jun Lee said most of that came from foreign exchange valuation losses on the company’s large foreign-currency cash and deposit holdings, as the won strengthened during the quarter.
HYBE also highlighted what it calls its “multi-home, multi-genre” strategy, pointing to KATSEYE in the US and &TEAM in Japan.
KATSEYE’s third EP WILD topped the Billboard 200 with first-week US sales of 150,000 copies, around five times the first-week sales of the group’s previous release, according to HYBE.
All 31 shows on KATSEYE’s European and North American tour, which takes in 27 cities, sold out.
The group will begin an 11-city arena tour of Asia and Oceania in January 2027.
Japan-based &TEAM has now had four consecutive million-selling releases across Japan and Korea, while its second Korean mini album Mark on Me entered the Billboard 200 at No. 20.
In October, HYBE expanded HYBE LABEL SERVICE, which HYBE AMERICA formally launched in October 2025, into HYBE Global Label Services, a company-wide unit covering distribution, marketing, and promotion for all of its labels.
The unit is led by Juan S. Arenas, its President, who was previously Chief Intellectual Property Officer at HYBE AMERICA.
HYBE’s superfan platform Weverse averaged 14.22 million monthly active users in Q3, down from a record 14.43 million in Q2.
Looking ahead, HYBE said BTS will continue its world tour through the first half of 2027 while working on music and other projects.
The company will also stage its first Weverse Con Festival outside South Korea in New Delhi in March 2027.
All KRW-USD conversions in this article were made at the average Q3 2026 exchange rate of approximately 1,419 KRW/USD, according to Bank of Korea data, except the Q2 2026 figure, which was converted at that quarter’s average rate of approximately 1,500 KRW/USD.Music Business Worldwide