The market capitalization of the Korean stock market, which has been on a bullish rally since the beginning of the year, including achieving the long-awaited ‘5,000’ (KOSPI 5000), recently surpassed Germany’s and even Taiwan’s.
According to the Korea Exchange (KRX) Information Data System on the 8th, the total market capitalization of the stock market, KOSDAQ market, and KONEX market as of the closing price on the 6th is 4799.3607 trillion won.
This amount is slightly higher than the Taiwan stock market capitalization (103.620799 trillion Taiwan dollars, 4798.6792 trillion won) based on the closing price on the 6th announced by the Taiwan Stock Exchange on the same day.
According to data from the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE), as of December last year, when the market capitalization of 89 stock exchanges around the world was converted to dollars and compared, the market capitalization of the Korea Exchange ranked 13th among exchanges around the world.
At the time, the No. 1 exchange in global market capitalization was NASDAQ (USD 37.5 trillion), New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, USD 31.4 trillion) in second place, and Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE, USD 9.3 trillion) in third place.
It was followed by Euronext (USD 7.8 trillion), Japan Exchange Group (JPX, USD 7.6 trillion), China’s Shenzhen Stock Exchange (USD 6.2 trillion), Hong Kong Stock Exchange (USD 6.1 trillion), India’s Mumbai Stock Exchange (BSE, USD 5.2896 trillion), National Stock Exchange of India (NSE, USD 5.2699 trillion), and Toronto, Canada. The Stock Exchange (TMX, USD 4.6 trillion) ranked at the top.
The 11th place was the Taiwan Stock Exchange (USD 3 trillion), the 12th place was the German Stock Exchange (USD 2.8986 trillion), and the market capitalization of the Korea Exchange was calculated to be around USD 2.7566 trillion (approximately KRW 4,034.4 trillion).
If you group it by country or region instead of looking at it by exchange, Korea’s stock market cap was ranked 10th in the world as of the end of last year, following the United States, China, the European Union (EU), Japan, Hong Kong, India, Canada, Taiwan, and Germany.
However, the Korean stock market continued its rapid rise even after the new year, quickly narrowing the gap with other large stock markets mainly in developed countries. KOSPI and KOSDAQ soared 20.8% and 16.8% compared to the end of last year, ranking first and third, respectively, among representative indices of major countries.
Due to this influence, the Korean stock market market capitalization surged 20.39% during this period. During the same period, the returns of Germany’s DAX30 index and Taiwan’s stock index were much lower, at only 0.94% and 9.73%, and were eventually overtaken by Korea.
In the securities world, expectations remain that the outward growth of the Korean stock market will continue for some time.
Although last week, as stock markets around the world suffered a measles due to the shock of gold and silver futures margin calls (additional margin requirements) and the reignited controversy over the profitability of artificial intelligence (AI), KOSPI also had to cough up some of its recent gains, but the general diagnosis of experts is that this is largely due to the aspect of ‘short-term profit taking and digestion of properties.’
Earlier this month, global investment bank (IB) JP Morgan attracted attention by announcing that it would raise the KOSPI basic scenario target to 6,000 and the bull market scenario target to 7,500.
Shin Min-kyung, Hankyung.com reporter radio@hankyung.com
date: 2026-02-08 01:36:00
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