In March, Billboard unveiled its 2026 Global Power Players list honoring leaders driving music business success outside the United States. Among the names recognized as this year’s Power Players, Hyunrock Han, representative director and CEO of HYBE JAPAN, was recognized for the first time. To mark the occasion, Billboard Japan sat down with Han to hear how he helped grow the company from around 20 employees at the time of his appointment to roughly 300, about his strategies with &TEAM, an act signed to the label he heads (YX LABELS) and more.

First, could you tell us a little about your background?

I spent my career in management strategy across a range of industries — finance, manufacturing, trading companies — before joining Big Hit Entertainment (now HYBE) in 2019. At my previous company, MISUMI Group, I was based in Thailand and handling the Asia region when a mutual friend introduced me to Si-Hyuk Bang, the Chairman of HYBE’s Board of Directors and the company’s founder. His business philosophy, his extraordinary creativity, and his character left a deep impression on me. I had no prior experience in the entertainment industry, but felt that I could put my background in strategy and various project experience to good use working under him, so I returned to South Korea in 2019.

So you weren’t assigned to Japan from the very beginning.

Initially, the plan was to work in Korea for a few years. But about six months after joining, I was asked to go to Japan. I wrestled with the decision, but told them, “The way I manage and operate based on my experience may differ from the conventions of the traditional music industry. In the process of reforming and shaping the organization, there may be friction and pushback. But whatever anyone says, I need you to trust me for three years.” I made my resolve clear and made up my mind to come to Japan.

You then became President of Big Hit Solutions Japan (now HYBE JAPAN) in 2020, when the company had fewer than 20 employees. Six years later, you’ve grown to around 300.

If someone asked me to do the same thing again, I’m not sure I could. [Laughs] That’s how hard those six years were. When I came to Japan, I had two broad missions. The first was to build an in-house, autonomous solutions organization. The second was to develop original Japanese artists.

When I arrived, HYBE was outsourcing virtually all of its operations through business partnerships. Company A handled live production, Company B ran the pop-up stores, Company C produced merchandise, Company D managed the fan club, and so on. But neither data nor institutional knowledge accumulates in-house that way. I restructured everything so that our own staff could handle each area. In my first year, I was conducting interviews with two or three people almost every single day. I didn’t limit myself to candidates with music industry experience and hired specialists in retail operations, merchandising, loyalty customer business and so on, bringing in experts from each field.

When I make decisions, I always base them on common sense, logic, and data. So I spent over a year organizing and connecting the various customer data sets our company held, looking at things like whether people who came to show were also purchasing albums, how pop-up visitors behaved online and so on, and built an organization that drives its business on the foundation of such data.

With data, you can do an accurate post-mortem whether a business succeeds or fails. This allows us to maintain a continuous improvement loop (PDCA) — forming hypotheses, executing, and refining our strategy. Repeating that process is how we’ve grown the organization.

The second mission — the original Japanese artist — is &TEAM. They’re HYBE’s first localized artist developed by one of its global headquarters outside of Korea, so everything was uncharted territory. I think we looked at over 50 properties just scouting for their rehearsal space. Everything from that initial groundwork to trainee contracts, we built from scratch through discussions among our staff.

Bringing together people from all different industries while taking on projects no one has done before must require tremendous leadership. What do you consistently tell your employees?

The two things I always tell everyone as being important are interpersonal excellence and problem-solving ability. Interpersonal excellence means the ability to generate empathy, draw others in, move them, bring them together, and drive them toward something new. Some people move others through passion, others build empathy through logical explanation, others have a natural charm they were simply born with — if there are 100 people, there are 100 different expressions of interpersonal excellence. Big business doesn’t move without people working together, so I tell my employees to develop the ability to speak straight with each other while bringing others along with them.

What do you mean by problem-solving ability?

No matter how thoroughly you plan, the unexpected always happens. So the ability to troubleshoot when something comes up is critically important. I hold myself to both of those standards at all times, and I encourage everyone to do the same. As HYBE JAPAN has grown this large, each business unit can also become siloed, so in Japan we created a structure called Artist Strategy.　

What role does that play?

It’s a team that tracks each area of business — live shows, merchandise, music releases — on a per-artist basis. Thanks to them, we’ve been able to keep each artist’s branding consistent and on course.

What strategy did you take with &TEAM, the second mission you mentioned?

When I took over as label head in June 2025, &TEAM had set “Japan to Global” as their goal, but I felt there were challenges because the fact that “&TEAM is an act from Japan” and that “&TEAM is taking on the global stage from Japan” wasn’t coming through clearly enough to the public yet. So first I simply focused on getting more people to know &TEAM, and on making them artists who are loved across all generations.

“Go in Blind” came in at No. 5 on Billboard Japan’s year-end single sales chart.

Thank you. I’m grateful to every fan who supported them. And to help more people learn about their “Japan to Global” challenge, we released the documentary series &TEAM 100 Days Journey 〜Howling out to the World〜. Typically, documentary footage is released after a phase of activity has wrapped, looking back at what went on behind the scenes. But this series was broadcast in near real time.

So fans could feel like they were running alongside them.

Yes. There were many things we couldn’t show in advance — new choreography, for example — so in practice it turned out to be incredibly difficult. Debuting in South Korea was a major challenge for us. I wanted viewers to experience firsthand what kind of conflict, struggle, and obstacles they were facing as they pushed forward. We aired it on terrestrial TV and Hulu, while also releasing edited excerpts on &TEAM’s official YouTube channel to reach fans all over the world.

If the goal is global expansion, there’s an argument for targeting North America first rather than South Korea. Why did you choose the latter?

Because of what I’d call the “distribution structure” of K-pop and Korean television broadcasting. In Korea, when a music program airs, the official footage from that program is also shared on YouTube. High-quality video broadcast from television can reach the entire world almost immediately. We wanted to deliver &TEAM’s performances globally through that ecosystem, and that’s what led us to pursue the Korean debut. Korea has a concentrated wealth of know-how for expanding the K-pop industry to the world. Just as BTS spread Korean culture across the globe, one of our goals is for &TEAM to eventually become a bridge, not just through their music, but connecting Japanese culture, food, lifestyle, and trends to the rest of the world.

Since 2022, you’ve also been running THE CITY, an initiative that partners with local governments and companies to create new entertainment experiences. Could you share your thoughts on the economic impact that live events create?

This may sound contradictory, but as technology has advanced and people can now watch livestreamed concerts, the value and scarcity of the offline experience has actually increased. And then, to make that offline experience more flexibly enjoyable, IT technology becomes important again, meaning a kind of cycle has emerged. Our “digital stamp” service for preserving memories with artists, or WEVERSE Pickup, which eliminates wait times at merchandise booths at concert venues, are examples of this. By making smart use of these digital tools, the time spent offline becomes all the more meaningful.

HYBE is a company born in South Korea, but the foundation of HYBE JAPAN’s coexistence model is to firmly take root in Japan and grow from there. Giving people more to enjoy before and after a show also connects to revitalizing the local area, and we felt it was important in terms of letting fans feel a deeper connection with the artists they love.

The first thing we tackled was a merchandise pre-order system. In the past, buying goods at a venue meant standing in line. But by building a system where fans select items and pay in advance, then come to pick them up at a designated time, there’s no longer any need to queue. The time that would have been spent waiting can now be used for pop-up experiences, dining, or anything else.

Shows draw not just people from nearby, but fans traveling from far away by bullet train or plane. For those fans, we’ve developed shops featuring local specialties from the area, which might in turn lead to passersby coming across the artist collaboration pop-up and becoming a new fan. It creates mutual promotional benefits for both sides.

MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN launched in 2025 as an initiative to accelerate the export of Japanese content globally. How do you see it developing?

I think it’s a truly meaningful music award as an effort to send a diverse range of artists from Japan out into the world. NewJeans’ “Ditto” won the award for Best K-Pop Song in Japan last year, and I’m very grateful that artists from HYBE MUSIC GROUP are receiving such positive recognition. Going forward, I hope this award takes firm root and becomes a central launchpad for artists to take flight from Japan to the world.

—This interview by Naoko Takashima first appeared on Billboard Japan