Chaebol of South Korea's top conglomerates has decreased from 2012 to 2015. Not only did their profits stop increasing, but certain chaebols such as LG, have been making losses and losing talent. Some chaebol are one large corporation while others have broken up into loosely connected groups of separate companies sharing a common name. Even in the latter case, each is almost always owned, controlled, or managed by the same family group. South Korea's chaebol are often compared with Japan's keiretsu business groupings, the successors to the pre-war zaibatsu. While the "chaebol" are similar to the "zaibatsu" (the words are cognates,
Chaebol culture. Massive market concentration exists as is evident from the fact that 80% of the country's GDP is derived from the chaebol. The largest of the group, Samsung, exports 20% of South Korea's goods and services alone. Although no longer financially supported by the government, these firms have attained economies of scale on such a massive level that it is extremely difficult for a startup or small or medium enterprise (SME) to surmount the high barriers to entry. A majority of these smaller companies end up being acquired by the chaebol, only increasing their size and economic dominance. In recent