How many people actually work at that Korean company?
Updated
A Korean supplier's website says “150 employees, state-of-the-art facility.” The website is marketing. Two public records say how many people are actually on the payroll, and neither can be edited by the marketing department.
Record one: the corporate filing
Companies on the Korean corporate register file an employee count (
종업원수
number of employees
Record two: pension contributions
The stronger evidence is monthly. Every Korean employer files a National Pension contribution for each member of staff, every month, and the workplace-level figures are public: subscriber counts, new joiners, departures. This is the closest thing to a live payroll feed that public data offers, and it is the check that matters most for a company too small to file audited accounts.
| What you see | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Subscribers stable or rising | The company is paying salaries every month. It exists in the fullest sense. |
| Subscribers falling sharply | Staff are leaving faster than they are replaced. Any single month looks fine; the trend is the finding. |
| Contributions stopped | The earliest public sign of real trouble — it usually precedes a formal closure filing by months. |
| No workplace found | Normal for a sole trader with no staff. For a company claiming a factory and a team, a question worth asking directly. |
What the numbers cannot tell you
Pension figures count employees on the Korean payroll. They do not count dispatched workers, subcontractors, or production that happens in someone else's factory — which matters, because many Korean “manufacturers” are trading companies whose real headcount is a sales office. A supplier claiming 150 staff whose filings show 12 is not necessarily lying — but the gap is exactly the question to put to them before you commit.
Start with the free registration check; a commissioned report adds twelve months of staffing history.
Check a number