Viral earworm «Baby Shark» may have given producer Kim Min-seok a fortune of about $125 million, but his uncle is doing much better because of a deal with the official Major League Baseball.
Kim Chang-soo and his family have an estimated net worth of roughly $1 billion, mostly due to their 54 percent stake in F&F Co., whose shares almost tripled last year after striking a deal to sell official Major League Baseball (MLB)-branded apparel in China.
F&F manufactures and sells official MLB-branded clothing, bags and ball caps. Discovery Expedition, another famous F&F brand, sells outdoor apparel under a licensing deal with Discovery Channel. «Demand for the brand was driven by the popularity of its ball caps -- now its sneakers and clothing are adding» to that, wrote Son Hyo-joo, an analyst at Hanwha Investment & Securities in a research note.
Planned Store Openings
In June, it launched an online store on Alibaba’s Tmall, attracting more than 3.55 million visitors in two months, and opened two brick-and-mortar stores in Shanghai in December. The company, founded in 1992, plans to open as many as 10 stores in China this year.
F&F’s revenue for the nine months through September surged 38 percent to 580.7 billion won ($493 million) from a year earlier, according to a financial statement.
Fashion Foray
Kim, 58, got his start by joining the publishing business founded by his father. His older brother now leads Samsung Publishing, the second-largest shareholder of SmartStudy, which produced the popular rendition of «Baby Shark». He turned to fashion by introducing foreign brands, including Italian label Benetton, to the local market in the 1990s.
«There’s no country like Korea that spends so much on clothing as compared to national income,» said Kim in an interview with a local newspaper.
