South Korea vs. Japan: Where Are the Best Value Investing Opportunities?

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Ryan Albert discussed South Korea vs. Japan: Where Are the Best Value Investing Opportunities? Here’s an excerpt from the episode:

[Ryan] The big—I mean, many ways to take that, but I would say the big difference is just Japanese companies do not have the same controlling shareholder family dynamics as

Korean companies. There’s more or less a professional management class. So when there’s a professional management class, it’s—let’s just say it’s easier to buy up shares and easier to influence and win proxy battles.

So in Japan in particular, you’ve seen a lot more activity and a lot more funds get involved simply because I think there’s just more companies and more shares out there to buy.

It’s hard to buy up a lot of shares when families own a majority—that’s 20, 40, 60 percent of companies. So I’d say everything goes back down in terms of the difference into just the setup, like the actual composition of the companies.

Japan has less controlled entities and Korea has a majority controlled.