History

Figures converted from Korean won at historical FX rates — see data/company.json.fx_rates. Ratios, margins, and multiples are unitless and unchanged.

The Record and Its Breaks

Korea Asset In Trust was incorporated in March 2001 as Kookmin Asset Trust, a wholly-owned vehicle of the state bad-bank KAMCO, and began operating one month later by absorbing twelve land-trust projects from the collapsed Koret Trust [1]. Four breaks define the twenty-five years since: the KAMCO carve-out and distressed-portfolio transfers of 2001–02; the change of control that moved the company from the state to Daishin and then to developer MDM and its founder Moon Ju-hyun in July 2011 [1]; the KOSPI listing on 13 July 2016 [2]; and the property-development downturn that took operating income from $116.1 million in 2022 to $23.6 million in 2025 [3].

This tab records what was said and what followed. One structural note about the sources: KAIT holds no earnings call and publishes no transcript, so every promise below comes from a filing, an IPO document, or one of the twelve quarterly investor decks in the corpus, which begin only in August 2023. For periods before that, the annual business report is the sole management-voice record. Who runs and owns the company today sits in People; the named-rival record sits in Competition.

Sources: FY2021 Annual Business Report, company history [1]; FY2025 Annual Business Report, listing status and share count [2] [4]; market capitalisation as reported at 7 August 2026.

The Arc in Dated Beats

The chronology below is taken verbatim from the company-history tables in the annual business reports. Two things are worth noting about the table itself. First, the FY2021 report listed thirty entries running to 2020; the FY2025 report lists seventeen and stops at the 2016 listing, dropping every capital raise, every stock dividend and the two subsidiary formations [1] [2]. Second, the FY2025 report states there was no change of control, no merger, no reorganisation proceeding and no change of principal business during its disclosure period [5].

Sources: FY2021 Annual Business Report, company history and subsidiary history [1] [6]; IPO prospectus, offering terms [7]; FY2025 Annual Business Report, board changes, treasury cancellation and bond record [5] [4] [8] [9]; news record for the 2024 bond attempt and the 2026 leadership change [10].

The controlling-shareholder table records the ownership sequence in full: KAMCO from 20 March 2001, Daishin MSB from March 2010, a Daishin private-equity vehicle from 11 July 2011, and MDM Co with Moon Ju-hyun from 12 July 2011 — a one-day handoff [11]. The related-party bloc around MDM has been added to and trimmed nine times since, most recently in April 2020 [11].

What the Company Earned

Reported revenue peaked at $199.5 million in FY2023 and has fallen for two consecutive years, to $141.0 million in FY2025. Operating margin fell in every year from FY2020 — 74.4%, 69.6%, 63.0%, 45.0%, 22.9%, 16.8% — a six-year compression with no interruption. Net income does not track it: FY2023 net income rose 19.8% to a record $99.8 million while operating income fell 20.5%, and FY2025 net income rose 32.0% to $34.1 million while operating income fell 33.9% [3].

Sources: 4Q 2025 investor presentation, six-year performance table [3]; 2Q 2023 investor presentation for FY2018–FY2019 [12].

Management publishes a second return measure alongside reported ROE: an adjusted ROE on a separate-entity basis that charges the year with the movement in the regulatory loan-loss reserve. The two series diverge sharply from FY2023. Reported ROE was 13.2% in FY2023 while adjusted ROE was 1.35%; reported ROE was 3.60% in FY2024 while adjusted ROE was negative [13] [14]. In FY2025 the relationship inverts: adjusted ROE of 9.51% against reported ROE of 4.64%, because $31.3 million of the reserve built in FY2024 was scheduled for reversal [15] [16].

Sources: FY2022, FY2023, FY2024 and FY2025 Annual Business Reports, key management indicators [17] [13] [14] [15].

Management Said, and What Followed

The ledger below pairs each dated commitment with the outcome the filings later reported. Because there is no call record, the commitments are drawn from the IPO use-of-proceeds statement, the quarterly decks and the annual management discussion. Every row names the period the promise covered and the basis on which it was measured.

Sources: IPO prospectus use of proceeds [18] and issuance-results report [19]; 3Q 2023 investor presentation, funding plan [20]; 4Q 2024 investor presentation, shareholder-return note [21]; FY2022, FY2023, FY2024 and FY2025 management discussion [17] [13] [14] [22]; 1Q 2026 investor presentation [23]; FY2024 Annual Business Report, summary financial information for the borrowings figures [43]; news record for the Yeouido apology and bidding [10].

The trust-account loan balance is the clearest single test in that ledger, because the company put a number on it. In November 2023, with the balance at $339.6 million, the deck stated a year-end figure of approximately $269.5 million and described the 2023 funding plan as resting on the increase in equity [20]. The balance closed 2023 at $361.1 million, reached $557.0 million at end-2024, and stood at $524.7 million at 1Q 2026 [24].

Sources: 3Q 2023 investor presentation for 2019–2021 [20]; 1Q 2026 investor presentation for 2022–1Q 2026 [24].

Asset quality moved with it. Assets classified substandard or below went from $63.2 million in 2022 to $518.8 million in 2024 and $504.8 million at 1Q 2026, against total assets that rose from $1,077.6 million to $1,235.4 million over the same span. The allowance coverage ratio management publishes rose from 23% to 36% [25].

Source: 1Q 2026 investor presentation, asset quality condition [25].

Capital Allocation

The company has raised equity once as a public issuer, in 2016, and has never returned to the market for it. The IPO sold 27,297,345 shares at $8.65 for a gross $236.2 million, but only 11,512,480 of those shares were newly issued: 57.8% of the deal was a secondary sale, and $136.6 million went to selling shareholders rather than to the company [7] [26]. Net proceeds to KAIT were $98.2 million [18]. KAMCO cut its stake from 18.51% to 6.40% in the offering; the employee stock ownership association took up 351,897 of the 5,459,469 shares reserved for it, or 6.4% of its allocation [27].

Sources: FY2021 Annual Business Report, company and subsidiary history [1] [6]; IPO prospectus and issuance-results report [7] [18] [19]; FY2025 Annual Business Report, bond record, use of proceeds, equity statement, treasury cancellation and reserve notes [28] [9] [8] [4] [16]; 1Q 2026 investor presentation, subsidiary results [29]; news record for the 2025 bond book [10].

The dividend record runs unbroken for eleven consecutive year-end payments covering 2015 through 2025 [30]. Its level is not unbroken. The cash dividend was $0.168 per share for FY2016–FY2019 alongside a stock dividend, the equivalent of $0.185 falling to $0.169 for FY2020–FY2023, $0.068 for FY2024, and $0.104 for FY2025 [12] [30]. Payout ratio rose as earnings fell, from 21% in FY2023 to 33% and 37% [3]. Total cash paid was $20.7 million for FY2023, $8.3 million for FY2024 and $12.7 million for FY2025 [30].

Sources: FY2025 Annual Business Report, dividend history [30]; 2Q 2023 and 4Q 2025 investor presentations for the pre-2023 dividend and payout series [12] [3].

The Book the Company Was Winning

New fee mandates are the leading indicator management publishes, and the composition of that number changed more than its level. Total contracted fees fell from $190.2 million in 2021 to $56.4 million in 2023, then recovered to $67.7 million in 2025 [31] [24]. Within the loan-type land trust line, conventional mandates fell from $30.0 million in 2022 to $11.0 million in 2025 while redevelopment mandates went from $3.2 million to $29.7 million — the recovery is entirely a mix shift [24].

Source: 1Q 2026 investor presentation, contracted trust and REIT fees [24].

The redevelopment pipeline the decks disclose grew through the downturn without interruption. Households in mandates at reserve-trustee stage or beyond went from 11,662 in August 2023 to 19,800 by May 2026, against a planned post-completion count that rose from 19,889 to 33,081 [32] [33]. The decks caution that the list excludes projects at consultation stage and that entries are subject to change [33]. Total trust assets under management, the other scale measure, moved much less: $16.3 billion at end-2021 and $15.6 billion at end-2025, with loan-type land trust assets inside it falling from $2.1 billion to $1.5 billion [31] [34].

Sources: 2Q 2023, 4Q 2023, 4Q 2024 and 1Q 2026 investor presentations, reconstruction project tables [32] [35] [36] [33].

How the Explanation Changed

The account management gave for the earnings decline moved through four distinct stages in four annual reports. The wording is worth setting side by side, because the cause named in each year is different and the sequence runs steadily inward, from world interest rates to the company's own geographic concentration.

March 2023, on FY2022: "the pandemic ended and private consumption was expected to recover, but only briefly; as global rate-hiking and domestic and overseas economic uncertainty spread, the domestic property market contracted rapidly." Net income was said to have risen 0.73% "as a result of the company responding pre-emptively to risk" [17].

March 2024, on FY2023: the year is described as one in which "successive defaults and bankruptcies of developers and contractors" raised fears of project-finance impairment. Net income rose 19.8%, attributed to dividend and interest income rather than fees, while adjusted ROE fell 8.22 percentage points to 1.35% [13].

March 2025, on FY2024: "a triple bind of interest-rate rises, worsening inflation and a construction slowdown." For the first time the report names the mechanism inside its own income statement: "the main reason for the decline in operating income is the increase in credit-loss provisions" [14].

March 2026, on FY2025: "the capital-region property market showed a gradual recovery, while the non-capital regions where the company's main projects are concentrated continued to carry a high share of unsold housing, and regional polarisation deepened" [22].

The industry-outlook section of the same reports moved on a different clock. Its opening sentence blamed household debt and the government's cooling measures plus rising trade protectionism in the FY2021 report [37]; then ran verbatim across three consecutive reports — FY2022, FY2023 and FY2024 all open "the property development market has recently contracted amid the global interest-rate hiking trend and the spread of domestic and overseas economic uncertainty" [38] [39]; and changed only in the FY2025 report, which for the first time named project finance in that sentence: "amid complex factors including the widening concern over project-finance impairment" [40]. One sentence in that section did not change at all across FY2022 through FY2025: that if the company applies its experience and risk-management capability in loan-type land trust well, it can create new opportunities even in a difficult environment [38] [40].

Sources: FY2021 through FY2025 Annual Business Reports, industry outlook and management discussion sections [37] [17] [13] [14] [22] [40]. Intensity is the writer's coding of whether a theme is absent, present or leading in that year's text.

Definitions That Moved

Three of the metrics a reader would use to track this record were redefined or restated during the period, in each case without a reconciliation note in the source.

Sources: 4Q 2025 and 1Q 2026 investor presentations, trust order tables [41] [24]; FY2024 and FY2025 Annual Business Reports, key management indicators [14] [15].

Where the Record Runs Out

Three gaps are worth naming, because chapters citing this tab will hit them.

The 2020–21 injections that took Korea Asset Capital's paid-in capital from $50.4 million to $168.0 million are recorded as dated events, but no return on that $117.6 million is disclosed anywhere in the corpus [6]. The subsidiary's standalone results appear in the decks from 2023 onward — $5.5 million of net income in 1Q 2026 on $334.6 million of equity — but there is no bridge between the capital put in and the profit that came out [29].

The REIT book carries $3,638.6 million of assets under management across eighteen funds, sixteen with approval years running from 2012 to 2024 and two still in progress. One of them, MDM REITs, is $1,418.1 million, or 39% of the total [42]. The management fee that book has produced is shown only as a cumulative figure on the slide, never year by year.

And the $41.4 million transferred from share premium to retained earnings in 2025 is recorded in the statement of changes in equity with no stated purpose, in the same year the company reversed $31.3 million of loan-loss reserve and raised the dividend 50% [8] [16] [30]. Both movements pass through distributable earnings; the filings describe neither as related to the other.