Some fans of singers belonging to SM Entertainment held a truck protest in front of the HYBE office building in defense of the current management.
Some SM fans held a truck protest in front of the HYBE office located in Yongsan-gu, Seoul from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm on February 27th.
The truck contained phrases such as ‘All SM fans who oppose HYBE’s monopoly, we support SM without HYBE,’ ‘Don’t ruin K-pop by eating and monopolizing SM,’ ‘Monopoly destroys culture,’ and ‘XX company HYBE, which spends 10 billion on tree planting.’
Some fans of the truck protest drew attention by criticizing the relationship between HYBE and former SM general producer Lee Soo Man, using harsh expressions in some sentences.
Some fans of SM who held the truck protest recently sent an e-mail to the press, saying, “We wanted to cheer for SM 3.0 artists/fan plans because we think we can achieve what we really wanted in SM 3.0 but we made our minds when we saw that they continued to publish bad articles,” they said, revealing the reason for the truck protest.
SM is currently divided into Lee Soo Man, former general manager of SM, and Lee Sung Soo, co-CEO of SM and Tak Young Joon’s current management-Kakao-Align Partners alliance, which are at odds over management rights. On February 9th, HYBE signed a contract to acquire 14.8% of SM’s 18.46% stake held by SM founder and largest shareholder Lee Soo Man for 422.8 billion won and completed the transaction on the 22nd. As a result, HYBE became the largest shareholder of SM.
On February 7th, Kakao acquired 1.23 million new shares issued by SM in the form of a paid-in capital increase assigned to a third party and secured 1.14 million shares through the acquisition of convertible bonds to acquire a 9.05% stake in SM. The total amount of the stake acquisition was 217.152 billion won, making Kakao the second largest shareholder of SM.
Source:(A)