IB in South Korea

If you are thinking about BBs or EBs, nepotism is at its peak. It is almost impossible to get these jobs without some connections. One can assume that there are 10= new openings per year in the entire Korean BB/EB scene (1st year analyst positions). Needlessly to say, culture is extremely extremely extremely bad. If you think the US working culture is bad, x3 the US IB culture. The worst part is that you not only have to work insane hours but as juniors, you have to go out and drink with clients and kiss their ass. In terms of comp, it's obviously not comparable to the US, but I would say you will still make ~150k or 200,000,000 KRW as an associate. While the comp looks smaller, you will have much higher quality of life with that money compared to the U.S. 

comps are smaller than other financial centres but South korea have lower taxes and price level so quality of life would be similar

facetime culture is much harsh than other offices

let's be clear here, we're talking about folks that are connected to and lived in Korea right?

not Korean Americans who are literally Americans.

This fails to disappoint 

Wow, things went south real fast above...

How would the IBD culture in South Korea compare to that in Hong Kong in terms of sweatiness and toxicity? I did IB in HK for quite a while (BB and EB experience) and must say the culture is definitely worse across the board compared to NYC/London. Is South Korea on par in this regard, as I could not imagine things getting much worse than in HK and why people would do this job for lower comp.

Anecdotally, heard of some ER analysts in South Korea looking to lateral to a HK shop and literally did not know how to walk through a DCF...

Anybody have intel on IB in North Korea? I heard its pretty brutal

Above comments are quite old. Describes the scene 10 years ago. Juniors arent taken to clients to drink and this culture has largely gone away due to covid. More so of dinner & drinks and golf since clients know the IB scene long enough to know better. Quality of work and your insights matter much more now, no longer just the chairman making the calls.

Face time exists but also much more bearable. Juniors no longer compete against each other and do not put up with the old hours and weekend work. WLB has improved significantly at the cost of work quality but there are pros and cons to this. There are very few associates remaining who can run a process as they have all joined private equity.

Having said that the fee structure makes it structurally difficult to have a great wlb and culture. Significantly lower than Japan and China which means more volume to meet the budget.

On the topic, anyone got any advice for a korean person that is not an international tryhard lol 

adding about comps, associates are expected to earn 400~500 mil krw

Gonna try to ignore a lot of what's said in this thread and speak from what I know about the Korean IB/PE scene.

IB
Major BBs and MM players from abroad either do not fare so well here or suddenly become elite boutique-like shops. For example, Macquarie's infrastructure division is treated like HL Rx here (standout group). Local players such as Mirae Asset, NH, KB, etc. tend to fare very well. Elite boutiques rarely exist in Korea. UBS and JPM tend to do fine, GS rarely does any deals and have pretty good working hours since they have virtually no live deals going on. Although it depends on bank and group, culture is not great with a big emphasis on post-work hours activities like drinking together and going to "room salons" (generally karaoke rooms with "helper" women) and I'll leave it up to you to imagine what happens there. For example, UBS is notorious for taking interns to these room salons...

Mandates for Korea are generally split between the Seoul office and Hong Kong office by virtue of mandate sizes often being very small to the point a significant Seoul team may not be justified, at least for every single coverage group. Hong Kong office seems like they take bigger IPOs and larger (~$600mn+) sell-side M&A mandates, in addition to some trickier cross-border M&As. 

[Private Equity]
PE firms in Korea are a different story. There are a couple PE firms in Korea that have pretty big fund sizes (think almost $10bn for recent vintages), but deal structures are generally very very vanilla. Also PE firms are very risk-averse so a lot of mezzanine investments take place as opposed to true distressed multi-tranche investing or LBOs. Mezzanine investments revolve around 4 region-specific instruments: RCPS (Reedemable Convertible Preferred Shares), CB (Convertible Bonds), BW (Bond with Warrant), and EB (Exchangeable Bonds).

Some of the larger PE players are MBK Partners, Hahn & Co., IMM, and STIC Investments. Reputation varies amongst them. Most generally do not take fresh hires and tend to recruit from IBs or VCs. MBK Partners generally stays quiet, as well as IMM and STIC Investments. IMM and STIC are generally known to have relatively "liberal" work cultures thanks to them having a decent amount of people from US IB or Big 4. Certain PE firms are known to be the worst, with the owner beating MDs/VPs with a baseball bat or the like if he doesn't feel too good but also pays associates $250k in Korea (think getting paid like $700k in NYC) and I don't know what to make of that firm. As everything in Korea and US PE, deal sourcing is extremely relationship based which means companies actively encourage drinking, but it also means smaller PE firms are a brutal sweatshop that tries their best to invest their dry powder into complete ShitCos.

[Internships]
Internships in Korea are pretty interesting and recruiting is far from structured. The average people that go to a reputed IB/PE shop right out of college generally does 5~6 internships before they are hired. Students generally do a couple off-cycle internships, and there is a preference for doing an MBB internship somewhere along the way because of powerpoint and thought organization skills (firms have a preference for this too). After a couple of off-cycles, you'll do maybe an on-cycle or two and get a return offer. Combined with military service for men, people who get a full time offer generally tend to be in their late 20s. Some of the interns at my firm right now were born in '98. There is also a very strong preference for Korean CPAs (KICPAs): I think around a good 1/6 of investment-side people in my firm are CPAs. CFAs not so much.

Internship recruiting is not very open-access. Target schools (Seoul National University, Korea University, Yonsei University) and semi-targets (Hanyang University, Sungkyunkwan University) have reputable "hakhwei"s or "study-clubs" that are feeders into financial services firms. A good portion of the recruiting happens by an alumni of the study-clubs contacting current members of that study-club to apply for a position, and this information is not released to others. Another good portion of the recruiting happens by job postings in target school career boards, and some firms choose to only invite applicants for an interview if current members or previous interns recommend that person. Nothing is streamlined or has a timeline, and if you get the offer, you generally start the same week or monday the next week (no 1.5 year in advance recruiting kind of stuff). 

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I'm very thankful for the current job I'm at right now, but if I had a choice I would take any group in NYC no questions asked, partially also because I have family in NYC and not in Korea.

Pretty long write-up but feel free to comment below if you have more questions. Thanks.