KEPCO E&C (052690): Korea’s Reactor Designer, Decoded

Since it won the design work for Hanbit units 3 and 4, one company has performed South Korea’s domestic nuclear plant design on a dedicated basis — both the plant and the reactor system inside it. KEPCO Engineering & Construction is the only listed way to own that work. It is also a $3.5bn company whose record 2025 profit came from selling an office building, and whose largest customer cannot be bought at all. This is what its own filings say it is.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • KEPCO E&C is the purest listed exposure to Korean reactor design. It holds both architect-engineering and nuclear steam supply system design capability in one company, and it performs Korea’s domestic reactor design work on a dedicated basis (Source: KEPCO E&C H1 2026 semi-annual report, DART rcpNo 20260814001293, filed Aug 14, 2026).
  • The order book is Czech and Emirati. Of roughly $1.94bn of remaining contract value in the company’s own major-project table as of June 30, 2026, 54.5% sits in two Czech Dukovany 5&6 contracts running to April 2038 and 18.0% in Barakah, UAE.
  • FY2025’s record profit was a building. Net income of $63.5M was driven by a $58.7M gain on disposal of the company’s former Yongin head office, a deal signed in April 2022 and settled in February 2025. Strip it out after tax, at the year’s 22.0% effective rate, and FY2025 earnings fall to roughly $17.7M.
  • The customer is a company you cannot buy. Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power — unlisted — accounted for 48.4% of consolidated H1 2026 revenue. Foreign investors buy the designer, never the orderer.
  • Foreigners sold into the advance. Over the 20 sessions from Aug 10 to Sep 7, 2026, foreign flows in KEPCO E&C (052690) ran to −$56.0M — net selling — while the shares rose 21.2%. Seven of those twenty sessions were net buys, but two heavy sell days on Aug 25 and 26 account for 57% of the 20-session net.

🏢 What Is KEPCO E&C, and What Does It Actually Sell?

KEPCO E&C sells reactor blueprints and the engineering services around them — it designs nuclear power plants for other people to build, and it is the only Korean company that designs both the reactor system and the plant around it.

Two Korean terms matter here and they are easy to blur. Architect-engineering (종합설계, “A/E”) is the design of the whole plant — buildings, turbine island, balance of plant. NSSS design (원자로계통설계) is the design of the nuclear steam supply system: the reactor, its coolant loops, the safety systems. Most countries split these between different firms. KEPCO E&C does both, and its own filing describes the company as holding “the technology for both comprehensive nuclear plant design and reactor system design,” able to “design the primary and secondary systems simultaneously” (Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, H1 2026 semi-annual report, business overview).

It is not a construction company and it is not an equipment maker. It does not pour concrete and it does not forge reactor vessels — Doosan Enerbility does that. KEPCO E&C is the drawing office, plus operations-and-maintenance engineering for the plants already running, plus decommissioning engineering for the ones being retired. Headcount as of June 30, 2026 was 2,506 employees with average tenure of 12.3 years, and the company reports roughly 690 staff holding master’s or doctoral degrees (Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, employee status table, as of Jun 30, 2026).

The company is headquartered in Gimcheon, North Gyeongsang Province, and has been listed on the KOSPI since December 14, 2009. For a neutral entity reference, see KEPCO E&C on Wikipedia; the company’s own English site is at kepco-enc.com. It is investment grade on both domestic and international scales: Moody’s A2 as of December 9, 2025, and AA from NICE Investors Service as of June 11, 2026 and from Korea Ratings as of May 28, 2026 (Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, credit-rating table, which lists every rating action from FY2024 through Q2 2026).

📊 Where Does KEPCO E&C’s Revenue Actually Come From?

Nuclear work — plant design plus reactor-system design — was 89.1% of first-half 2026 revenue, and exports were 19.0% of the total, essentially all of it Czech.

The half-year report publishes a segment table most Korean industrials do not: revenue split by business division, by service type, and by domestic versus export. The figures below are cumulative for the six months to June 30, 2026, consolidated.

Segment Domestic Export Total Share
Nuclear (plant A/E, O&M, waste, decommissioning) $82.8M $21.7M $104.5M 64.9%
Reactor (NSSS design, SMR development) $29.9M $9.2M $39.0M 24.2%
New Energy (LNG, offshore wind, EPC) $17.8M −$0.3M $17.5M 10.9%
Total $130.4M $30.6M $161.0M 100%

Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, “Sales and orders” table, cumulative six months to Jun 30, 2026, consolidated. Converted at ₩1,345.06/$1 (as of Sep 7, 2026). The New Energy export line is negative in the filing (a contract revision).

Two details deserve underlining. First, that 19.0% export share is almost entirely two Czech line items — Dukovany 5&6 architect-engineering and Dukovany 5&6 NSSS design. Second, the New Energy division is shrinking fast: it fell from $94.0M in FY2024 to $57.8M in FY2025, a 38.5% decline, as the coal-plant design franchise that once carried the company runs out.

One accounting note the company itself flagged: from FY2025 it began reporting revenue from government research programmes — the innovative SMR (i-SMR) work among them — inside operating revenue rather than non-operating income, as an accounting-policy change (Source: DART rcpNo 20260210800769, disclosure of change in revenue or profit structure, filed Feb 10, 2026). Some of what now reads as commercial design revenue is state R&D funding that used to sit below the operating line.

🗓️ Where Did KEPCO E&C Come From, and Why Do Old Documents Call It KOPEC?

It was incorporated in October 1975 as Korea Atomic Burns and Roe, Inc., a joint venture whose largest shareholder was the American engineering firm Burns & Roe; Korea Electric Power took that position in October 1978 and has held it ever since.

The name then changed three times. It was Korea Nuclear Engineering (KNE) from November 1976, Korea Power Engineering Company — KOPEC — from July 1982, and KEPCO Engineering & Construction only from July 2010. That last change is a practical trap for English-language research: US Nuclear Regulatory Commission dockets, IAEA papers and older trade press use KOPEC, so searching the current name alone makes the company look far younger and far less documented than it is. It listed on the KOSPI on December 14, 2009, and its head office sat in Yongin from November 1999 until August 2015, when it moved to Gimcheon Innovation City (Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, company history section — largest-shareholder changes, name changes and head-office relocations).

Hold on to that Yongin address. It becomes the largest number in the company’s 2025 accounts.

🌍 Is KEPCO E&C Actually a Global Leader, or Korea’s Only Option?

On the company’s own filing, the APR1400 is “the world’s only reactor design to have received both the US NRC design certification and European Utility Requirements certification” — but the NRC certificate is held by KEPCO and KHNP, not by the listed company you can buy.

That distinction is invisible unless you check both sides. The company writes, in Korean, that “the company’s APR1400 design is the world’s only design to have received both the US NRC design certification (NRC DC) and the European Utility Requirements (EUR) certification” (Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, competitive factors section — company-reported).

The American record is narrower, and it is explicit. The NRC’s APR1400 design certification page names the applicant as “Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., Ltd. (KHNP)”. So does the rule itself. The direct final rule — 84 FR 23439, published May 22, 2019 and effective September 19, 2019 — states that “the applicant for the certification of the APR1400 standard design is Korea Electric Power Corporation and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., Ltd. (KEPCO/KHNP),” and adds the design to US regulations as Appendix F to 10 CFR Part 52. (A companion document published the same day, 2019-10716, is the proposed rule that backstops the direct final rule — not the certification itself. It is an easy one to cite by mistake.)

So the certificate is real, it is American, and it belongs to the parent and to an unlisted sister company. KEPCO E&C did the engineering. It is not the certificate holder of record.

The filing logs that American milestone twice, under two labels — a “standard design approval” in its company-history section and a “final design certification” in its business section. They are two separate NRC actions with two dates — a standard design approval, which the filing logs in October 2018, and the certification rule, which took effect on September 19, 2019 — and English-language coverage routinely collapses them into a single undated “US approval”. What belongs in a shareholder’s notes is whose name is on the certificate, and it is not the listed company’s.

Where the company is genuinely dominant is at home. Its own business overview puts it this way: “beginning with the order for the design of Hanbit units 3 and 4, the company has to this day performed the primary- and secondary-system design of Korea’s domestic nuclear power plants on a dedicated basis” (Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, business overview — 전담 수행). That is a monopoly of a kind, and it is also a ceiling — the domestic market has exactly one buyer.

📈 Is the Business Getting Better or Worse?

Both, in opposite directions: the underlying design business improved sharply in the first half of 2026 — operating profit up 300% — while reported earnings per share collapsed 74.6%, because the prior-year comparison contained a one-off property gain.

Consolidated FY2023 FY2024 FY2025 H1 2025 H1 2026
Revenue $412.1M $423.4M $385.7M $153.3M $161.0M
Gross profit $83.1M $111.5M $83.8M $27.7M $37.5M
Operating profit $28.1M $52.7M $26.4M $3.2M $12.7M
Operating margin 6.8% 12.5% 6.8% 2.1% 7.9%
Net profit $24.3M $43.5M $63.5M $49.2M $12.5M
Basic EPS (won) ₩1,538 ₩2,244 ₩1,741 ₩442

Source: DART consolidated financial statements — FY2023–FY2025 annual (rcpNo 20260326001003) and H1 2026 semi-annual (rcpNo 20260814001293). Half-year columns are cumulative six-month figures, not three-month quarters. All three annual columns are taken from the FY2025 annual filing, so the table is on one basis. That filing restated both prior years for the revenue reclassification described above: FY2024 revenue $411.4M → $423.4M and operating profit $40.7M → $52.7M; FY2023 revenue $405.3M → $412.1M and operating profit $21.2M → $28.1M. Net profit is unchanged in both years, because the reclassification moved income from below the operating line to above it — it lifts revenue and operating profit without touching the bottom line. Pull FY2023 from the FY2024 annual report instead and you will get the smaller pair. The FY2025 annual report is cited here at rcpNo 20260326001003, the amended filing of March 26, 2026, which supersedes the March 23 original (rcpNo 20260323000234); the amendment adds a related-party disclosure and changes no financial-statement figure. Percentage changes quoted in the text are calculated on the filed won amounts and will not always reproduce exactly from the rounded US dollar figures shown here. Converted at ₩1,345.06/$1 (as of Sep 7, 2026). EPS is left in won because it is a per-share figure a reader will check against a Korean quote.

Read the last two columns together and the story separates cleanly. Revenue grew 5.1% year on year. Gross profit grew 35.4%. Operating profit grew from $3.2M to $12.7M. That is a real operating recovery. Net profit fell 74.6% anyway — because a year earlier the company had booked a gain that had nothing to do with reactors.

Management’s own explanation of the FY2025 result, filed with the exchange, names three causes: schedule delays on large nuclear projects including Shin-Hanul 3&4, declining service revenue as Saeul 3&4 approaches completion, and the reclassification of government-project revenue (Source: DART rcpNo 20260210800769, filed Feb 10, 2026). That is management’s characterisation; the revenue and margin figures above are from the audited statements.

🔍 Why Was 2025’s Record Profit a Real-Estate Deal?

Because $58.7M of it — 72.2% of pre-tax income — was a single gain on selling the company’s former Yongin head office, a building it moved out of in 2015 under a contract signed in April 2022.

The transaction is fully disclosed and has been for years, but only in Korean, and only if you follow a 2022 filing through three amendments to its 2025 settlement. The asset is described in the filing as “종전부동산(용인사옥)” — the former relocation property, Yongin office. The buyer is Solum Co., Ltd., an electronics-components maker. The price is $71.2M (₩95,755,500,000), excluding VAT, paid as a 10% deposit plus six equal semi-annual instalments. The board resolved the sale on April 1, 2022; the transfer reference date was February 6, 2025 (Source: DART rcpNo 20250206000060, amended material-event report on tangible-asset disposal, filed Feb 6, 2025).

The accounting lands in the first half of 2025 as a line called 매각예정자산처분이익 — gain on disposal of assets held for sale — of ₩78,975,791,993 (Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, note 31, prior-half comparative, consolidated). And the exchange filing that announced the FY2025 result says so in plain Korean: net income of $61.3M, “reflecting a ₩79.0bn gain on disposal of the old head office” — a provisional figure, later finalised at $63.5M in the audited accounts (Source: DART rcpNo 20260210800769, provisional result, filed Feb 10, 2026).

Here is the bridge, using only the two filed values and the balance-sheet carrying amount:

Yongin head office disposal Won USD
Sale price (ex-VAT), per the disposal filing ₩95,755,500,000 $71.2M
Less: carrying value, “assets held for sale, current” at Dec 31, 2024 −₩16,780,000,000 −$12.5M
= Gain recognised, H1 2025 (note 31) ₩78,975,791,993 $58.7M
Memo: FY2025 pre-tax income ₩109,416,438,076 $81.3M

Sources: sale price from DART rcpNo 20250206000060; gain and pre-tax income from DART rcpNo 20260814001293 and rcpNo 20260326001003. The carrying value is presented in the filing rounded to millions of won, so the bridge closes to within ₩0.3M. Converted at ₩1,345.06/$1 (as of Sep 7, 2026).

Now the arithmetic that changes how the stock looks. FY2025’s effective tax rate was 22.0%. Removing the disposal gain on that basis leaves roughly $17.7M of net income, an EPS of about ₩624 rather than the reported ₩2,244, and a return on average equity of about 4.0% rather than the reported 14.2%. On the reported figure the shares trade at 54.8× earnings. On the figure excluding the building, they trade at roughly 197×. Both are market capitalisation divided by net profit. The ₩624 is our calculation — the pre-tax gain taxed at the year’s 22.0% effective rate, removed from net income, divided by the 38,043,505 voting shares.

None of this is hidden and none of it is improper. It is simply not in English, and a screener that reads “FY2025 net income” will hand you a number that four-fifths of a building paid for.

📋 What Is Actually in the Order Book?

About $1.94bn of remaining contract value, of which 54.5% is the two Czech Dukovany contracts, 18.0% is the UAE, and 9.3% sits in two domestic projects that cannot legally start because the client has not issued a notice to proceed.

The half-year report publishes a project-by-project table of orders — client, contract date, end date, original contract value, value completed, and value remaining. It covers major projects only: those with an initial contract value of $19.3M or more (₩25.94bn, 5% of FY2025 revenue), excluding completed projects. It is not the company’s total backlog, and it should not be quoted as one.

Project Client Runs to Remaining
Czech Dukovany 5&6 — architect-engineering KHNP Apr 2038 $813.5M
Barakah operating-plant LTEA — A/E scope Nawah Energy (UAE) Jan 2031 $278.5M
Czech Dukovany 5&6 — NSSS design Doosan Enerbility Apr 2038 $241.5M
Shin-Hanul 3&4 — architect-engineering KHNP Oct 2033 $163.9M
Wangsin fuel-cell EPC (no notice to proceed) Gyeongju Clean Energy undetermined $148.5M
Barakah operating-plant LTEA — NSSS scope Nawah Energy (UAE) Jan 2031 $67.1M
Shin-Hanul 3&4 — NSSS design Doosan Enerbility Oct 2033 $59.5M
Sinan Eupdong ESS EPC (no notice to proceed) Nexus Green Energy undetermined $31.5M
2026 operating-plant emergency support KHNP Apr 2027 $23.6M
Wando Geumil offshore wind — pre-work Wando Geumil Offshore Wind Dec 2026 $22.9M
Romania CTRF (tritium removal facility) KHNP Sep 2027 $18.4M
Fourteen smaller projects various $68.1M
Total $1,936.9M

Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, “Order status” table, as of Jun 30, 2026 — major projects only (initial contract value ≥ $19.3M, the filing’s ₩25.94bn threshold), completed projects excluded. Converted at ₩1,345.06/$1 and ₩1,559.22/€1 (as of Sep 7, 2026; both rates and their source are stated in the disclaimer at the foot of this article); euro contracts are converted via won so a single rate triangle applies throughout. The rows above are each rounded to $0.1M and add to $1,937.0M; the $1,936.9M total is the conversion of the filing’s unrounded won and euro amounts. One transcription note: the filing’s order table prints the Czech project as “Dukovany units 6&6”, while the underlying contract disclosures name units 5&6 — we use 5&6.

By project location, that $1.94bn splits: Czech Republic 54.5%, Korea 26.4%, the UAE 18.0%, Romania 0.9%, Indonesia 0.1% — and the United States 0.0%. (Each share is rounded to one decimal, so the six add to 99.9%, not 100.0%.) A zero is only worth the search behind it, so here is the search. We pulled DART’s filing list (list.json) for corp_code 00159209 across January 1, 2025 to September 8, 2026, took every filing typed 단일판매·공급계약체결 — the mandatory disclosure a Korean listed company must make on winning a material single order — and read field 4, 판매·공급지역, on all twenty of them. Fourteen say 국내 (domestic), four 인도네시아 and two 체코. None says 미국. The word 미국 does appear nine times in the 260,000-character semi-annual report, and we read all nine: three are NRC certification milestones, one is a 2012 award from the American magazine ENR, two are footnotes explaining that “PE” and “PMP” are American professional credentials held by staff, and three describe the United States as a competitor nation or as a country expanding nuclear policy. None describes an order, a bid or a letter of intent.

The company says the same thing itself, in note 8 to the order table above. Our translation of the Korean: “in 2025 the company omitted the disclosure of one contract, for reasons arising from the applicable law and from the terms of its contract with the client, in accordance with K-IFRS 1115 paragraph 한129.2(1) and (2).” Note the 한 prefix on the paragraph number — it marks a paragraph inserted into the Korean adoption of the standard, with no counterpart in IFRS 15 itself, so an English reader who searches IFRS 15 for a paragraph 129 will find nothing. The note adds that the omitted item appears in no quarterly, half-year or annual report, and that the company 감사보고 하였습니다 — literally “made an audit report” of it; the filing names no recipient for that report (Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, order-status table, note 8). So there is at least one 2025 contract that the table above does not name, by design.

That is what has been disclosed, which is not the same as what exists. Government-to-government talks, memoranda of understanding and framework agreements are not disclosable events under Korean rules until they produce a binding contract of material size. This table is the floor of the company’s commercial commitments, not the ceiling of its prospects.

Three things follow. First, the Czech contracts are enormous relative to the company — the two together were signed at €939.6M, and the architect-engineering contract alone was disclosed as 226.0% of FY2024 revenue (Source: DART rcpNo 20251212801320 and rcpNo 20251224800396; the euro amounts and the exchange rates used are stated in the filings themselves). Read that 226.0% against the base the filing used, not the one in our table above: the disclosure measures the contract against FY2024 revenue as originally reported, $411.4M. Our five-year table carries the restated $423.4M, on which the same contract works out at 219.6% of a year’s revenue.

Second, they are slow. As of June 30, 2026, six months after signature, €23.2M of the €725.0M A/E contract had been performed — 3.2%. Spread evenly to April 2038, the two Czech contracts average roughly $86M of revenue a year against FY2025 revenue of $385.7M. Transformative over a decade; not a step-change next year.

Third, the counterparties are Korean. The Czech A/E contract is with KHNP; the Czech NSSS contract is with Doosan Enerbility. KEPCO E&C does not contract with the Czech utility. It subcontracts to the Korean entities that do — which is why only two foreign names appear anywhere on the client list: Nawah Energy, the Emirati operator of Barakah, and PT PLN, Indonesia’s state electricity utility, whose two engine-plant packages have $2.3M left between them.

💰 What Do You Actually Pay for KEPCO E&C Today?

About $3.48bn — roughly 55× reported earnings, close to 197× earnings excluding the building sale, and 7.9× book value for a company whose recurring return on equity is around 4%.

Metric Value
Share price (settled close, Sep 7, 2026) $90.93 (₩122,300)
Shares outstanding / treasury 38,220,000 / 176,495
Market capitalisation $3.48bn
P/E on reported FY2025 net profit 54.8×
P/E excluding the disposal gain ≈197×
P/E on H1 2026 annualised ≈139×
P/B on equity at Jun 30, 2026 ($440.7M) 7.89×
FY2025 dividend per share / yield $1.00 (₩1,347) / 1.10%
FY2025 ROE / ROE excluding disposal 14.2% / ≈4.0%

Earnings, equity, share counts and dividend per share are from DART rcpNo 20260814001293 and rcpNo 20260326001003. Every P/E in this table is market capitalisation divided by net profit, the same basis as the peer table below; measured against the reported EPS of ₩2,244 the headline multiple is 54.5× rather than 54.8×.

Price, shares and market capitalisation are settled Korea Exchange data as of Sep 7, 2026 (₩122,300 × 38,220,000 = ₩4.674tn). Korean markets were still trading on Sep 8 when this was written, so the September 8 price is deliberately excluded. Converted at ₩1,345.06/$1 (as of Sep 7, 2026). All ratios in this table are our calculations.

How does that sit against the rest of the listed Korean nuclear chain? All figures below are FY2025 consolidated, with market capitalisation at the Korea Exchange close of September 7, 2026 — one basis for every column.

Company (ticker) Mkt cap FY25 revenue Op. margin P/E P/B
KEPCO E&C (052690) $3.48bn $386M 6.8% 54.8× 7.48×
Doosan Enerbility (034020) $41.86bn $12,682M 4.5% 274.4× 4.69×
KEPCO KPS (051600) $1.58bn $1,172M 8.9% 17.1× 1.58×
Korea Electric Power (015760) $15.63bn $72,435M 13.8% 2.4× 0.43×
Hyundai E&C (000720) $10.51bn $23,094M 2.1% 25.3× 1.40×

Sources: FY2025 consolidated revenue, operating profit, net profit and total equity from each company’s DART annual filing; market capitalisation from Korea Exchange settled closes, Sep 7, 2026. P/E and P/B use FY2025 net profit and FY2025 year-end equity for every company including KEPCO E&C, so the column is comparable — which is why the KEPCO E&C P/B here (7.48×) differs from the 7.89× above, which uses June 2026 equity. Net profit is total consolidated net profit including any non-controlling interest, on the same basis for every row; KEPCO E&C’s own non-controlling interest is zero, so its ratio is unaffected by that choice. Converted at ₩1,345.06/$1 (as of Sep 7, 2026). Ratios are our calculations.

The chain is priced on narrative, not on current earnings — Doosan Enerbility’s 274× says that plainly. What is specific to KEPCO E&C is that its 54.8× is the flattering version of its own number. KEPCO KPS, the maintenance arm, does more than three times the revenue at a higher operating margin for less than half the market value.

🏷️ Which KEPCO Ticker Are You Actually Buying?

There are four listed “KEPCO” companies, one crucial unlisted one, and one former name that will send you to the wrong search results — and only 052690 is the reactor designer.

Entity Ticker What it is
KEPCO Engineering & Construction 052690 · KOSPI The reactor and plant designer. This article. No US listing, no ADR.
Korea Electric Power (KEPCO) 015760 · KOSPI / NYSE KEP The parent utility and 51.24% shareholder. The only one of the family with a US-listed ADR.
KEPCO Plant Service & Engineering (KEPCO KPS) 051600 · KOSPI Plant maintenance and overhaul — a different business, often confused with 052690.
Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP) Unlisted The reactor owner and orderer. DART corp_code 00382001 carries no stock code. You cannot buy it.
Doosan Enerbility 034020 · KOSPI Not a KEPCO company. The equipment maker — reactor vessels, steam generators, turbines.
“KOPEC” 052690’s own name from 1982 to 2010. Older NRC and IAEA documents use it.

Sources: DART corporate registry (corp_code master file, queried Sep 8, 2026) for entity names, English names and stock codes; the Korea Exchange for tickers; DART rcpNo 20260814001293 for the 1982 and 2010 name changes.

The entity that decides when a Korean reactor gets built — KHNP — is unlisted. So is the fuel company. Foreign capital that wants exposure to a Korean nuclear order has to express it through the designer, the equipment maker or the maintenance company, and each of those captures a different, smaller slice at a different time in the project. If you are working out how to hold any of them from outside Korea, our guides to buying Korean stocks as a foreign investor and to the Korean stocks that trade as US-listed ADRs cover the mechanics.

🌏 Is Foreign Money Buying or Selling?

Selling, in every multi-session window we can measure: −$56.0M over 20 sessions and −$3.6M over five, against a 21.2% rise. Seven of those twenty sessions were net buys, but the seven together came to $6.9M against $62.9M of selling on the other thirteen.

Window (KEPCO E&C, 052690) Foreign net Share price: base close → ₩122,300 (Sep 7)
5 sessions: Sep 1 – Sep 7, 2026 −$3.6M ₩110,500 (Sep 1) → +10.7%
20 sessions: Aug 10 – Sep 7, 2026 −$56.0M ₩100,900 (Aug 10) → +21.2%
Sep 7, 2026 alone +$1.9M ₩107,600 (Sep 4) → +13.7%
Year to date: Dec 30, 2025 – Sep 7, 2026 n/a ₩90,000 (Dec 30) → +35.9%
From the 12-month high n/a ₩194,800 (Apr 24) → −37.2%
From the 12-month low n/a ₩79,900 (Jul 30) → +53.1%

Flow figures are foreign net shares valued at each day’s settled close and summed — an approximation, not execution prices. The share counts come from the Korea Investment & Securities Open API into our own investor-flow database, which covers this ticker back to Jun 18, 2026 (hence no flow figure for the longer windows); the KRX Open API has no investor-flow endpoint. The closes used to value them, and every price in this table, are Korea Exchange settled data. Each price change is measured from the base close named in the cell to the Sep 7, 2026 settled close of ₩122,300. The base is the first settled close inside the window, the convention used across our Korean nuclear coverage so that the same stock carries the same number in every article. It has one consequence worth naming: a price change measured that way spans one session fewer than the flow figure beside it. August 10’s own move sits outside the +21.2%, while August 10’s foreign selling sits inside the flow figure beside it. The single-session row is the ordinary one-day change, measured from the previous settled close of ₩107,600 on September 4. Closes before Jun 18, 2026 — the year-to-date base and the twelve-month high and low, which cover Sep 8, 2025 to Sep 7, 2026 — come from a FinanceDataReader daily series whose Sep 7, 2026 close matches the exchange’s settled ₩122,300 exactly, which is how we checked it. Its Sep 8 row was an intraday snapshot and is excluded. Converted at ₩1,345.06/$1 (as of Sep 7, 2026).

The 20-session column is the one to sit with. The stock rose 21.2% while foreigners sold $56.0M of it — meaning the move was bought by domestic institutions and retail, not by the international money the “US reactor deal” narrative is nominally about. September 7 was not the only day foreigners bought, and it was not the biggest: seven of the twenty sessions were net buys. The largest of them was August 13, 2026, at +$2.8M of foreign buying in KEPCO E&C (052690) — half as much again as the latest session’s. All seven together came to $6.9M of buying, set against $62.9M of selling across the other thirteen. The two sell days of August 25 and 26 alone account for 57% of the 20-session net, which is why every multi-session total in the table is negative. One session is not a trend. Our weekly Foreign Flow Watch series tracks whether that holds.

The registered holders tell a slower version of the same story. Van Eck Associates Corporation — the American manager behind, among others, a US-listed nuclear ETF — crossed the 5% threshold on March 13, 2026 with 1,914,033 shares, or 5.01%, filed as a simple-investment holding with no joint holders named in the detail schedule (Source: DART rcpNo 20260325000205). Korea’s National Pension Service has been cutting, but not in a straight line. Its 5%-rule reports show 4,425,177 shares, 11.58% of issued stock, filed October 1, 2025, falling to 4,038,810 shares, 10.57%, filed January 2, 2026; the FY2025 annual report’s own census puts it at 3,923,625 shares as of December 31, 2025, which is 10.31% of the 38,043,505 voting shares. Then it went back in — a major-shareholder holdings report filed April 2, 2026 shows 4,226,797 shares, an increase of 303,172 — before reversing again. The most recent such report, filed July 2, 2026, shows 3,987,674 shares — 10.43% of issued stock, a reduction of 239,123 from the April figure (Sources: DART rcpNo 20251001000468, rcpNo 20260102000266, rcpNo 20260326001003, rcpNo 20260402002037 and rcpNo 20260702000265. The April and July filings are 임원・주요주주 특정증권등 소유상황보고서, the holdings report a 10%-or-more shareholder must file on a change — not a monthly return. The 5%-rule and major-shareholder reports are percentages of all 38,220,000 issued shares; the annual report’s table is a percentage of voting shares, which is why 10.43% and 10.31% are not comparable without saying so.)

🏛️ Who Controls KEPCO E&C, and What Do Minority Holders Get?

Korea Electric Power owns 51.24% and, because KEPCO E&C is a designated public institution, its executives are recommended by a statutory nomination committee and confirmed by government — so the board is not really the shareholders’ instrument.

Start with the stake, because the same holding has two published percentages and both are correct. The FY2025 annual report’s 5%-shareholder table shows Korea Electric Power with 19,493,600 shares at 51.24%, footnoting that the ratio is calculated on voting shares of 38,043,505, excluding 176,495 treasury shares (Source: DART rcpNo 20260326001003). DART’s structured largest-shareholder API returns 51.00% for the same holding, because it divides by all 38,220,000 issued shares. We use 51.24% throughout and say so; the difference is a denominator, not a disagreement.

The governance facts a Western reader will not have seen:

  • It is a public institution. The company operates under Korea’s Act on the Management of Public Institutions. Standing and non-standing directors are put forward by a statutory executive recommendation committee (임원추천위원회) and their terms are fixed by the supervising ministry — the filing notes that appointment and term-start dates differ because the supervising ministry fixes the term.
  • One director is a worker director. Non-standing director Lee Dong-jin sits under Article 25(3)2 of that Act — a labour director, a category with no US or UK analogue.
  • The board turned over almost completely in ten weeks. Three extraordinary general meetings — March 18, May 18 and May 28, 2026 — replaced three standing directors and three non-standing directors. The CEO had changed at an EGM in December 2024.
  • Nothing has ever been cancelled; nothing has been bought back since 2014. The share-count table records cumulative shares retired since listing of zero, under both capital reduction and profit cancellation. The 176,495 treasury shares (0.46%) were bought in the open market through two brokerage trust mandates, both for “maintaining and stabilising an appropriate share price”: an $18.6M mandate with Samsung Securities signed December 28, 2012, which acquired 98,057 shares, and a $37.2M mandate with Shinhan Investment signed November 21, 2013, which added 78,438. (Those two limits were written as ₩25bn and ₩50bn; like every figure here they are converted at the September 7, 2026 rate, not the rate of 2012 and 2013.) The second expired on May 21, 2014 and the shares were returned in kind; the company has held them directly ever since (Sources: DART rcpNo 20121228000511, rcpNo 20131121000233 and rcpNo 20140521000386).
  • What happens to those shares next is genuinely open — and there is a statutory clock. The treasury table in the half-year report prints a cancellation deadline of 2027, and the long-term plan section says the company “intends to use treasury shares for the purposes of cancellation and of operating an employee stock ownership scheme,” and that it will draw up a disposal-and-cancellation plan before the mandatory cancellation deadline of September 5, 2027 set by Article 341-4 of the Commercial Act and Article 2(1) of its addendum. It also says that no concrete acquisition discussion is under way, that the method will be settled after consultation with the supervising ministry, and that the plan will go to a shareholders’ meeting. So: cancellation is on the record as an intention with a legal deadline, and there is no amount, no date and no board resolution behind it yet (Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, treasury-share status and long-term plan sections).
  • There is a live corruption record. On August 19, 2026, the Seoul Central District Court’s appellate bench convicted a former standing director on three counts — occupational embezzlement, violation of the Act on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, and violation of the Proceeds of Crime Act — with an eight-month suspended sentence and a fine of about $3,700 (₩5M). The first-instance court had convicted only on embezzlement and acquitted on the foreign-bribery count. The amount is small, ₩60.5M (the ₩1,100-per-dollar equivalent of $55,000 in the judgment), but the offence is not (Sources: DART rcpNo 20260820800317, appeal, and rcpNo 20250110800567, first instance).

On shareholder returns, KEPCO E&C is a Value-Up participant — it filed a corporate value-up plan on December 31, 2024, an implementation update on December 30, 2025, and re-filed on April 1, 2026 to flag its status as a high-dividend company under Article 104-27 of the Restriction of Special Taxation Act. That re-filing states FY2025 dividends of $38.1M against $28.3M the year before, a 34.83% increase, at a 60% payout ratio (Source: DART rcpNo 20260401801513). If you want the wider context for what these filings are meant to achieve, see our guide to Korea’s Value-Up programme.

Now put that dividend next to the building. The 60% payout was 60% of earnings that were mostly a property gain — so the dividend increase was, in cash terms, the Yongin office being distributed. And the related-party note shows where slightly more than half of it went: ₩26,257,879 thousand of dividends paid to Korea Electric Power in the first half of 2026 (Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, note 37, related-party transactions). That is $19.5M, exactly 51.24% of the total — the parent’s pro-rata share, paid by a board the parent effectively appoints, out of a gain on selling an asset the parent’s subsidiary had vacated.

Minority holders got the other 48.76% on identical per-share terms, so there is no unfairness in the mechanics. The point is what it says about the payout’s durability: the equity bridge below shows book value shrinking because the dividend exceeded the profit that funded it.

Total equity bridge, consolidated USD
Equity at Dec 31, 2025 $464.6M
+ H1 2026 net profit +$12.5M
+ H1 2026 other comprehensive income +$1.6M
− FY2025 dividend paid −$38.1M
= Equity at Jun 30, 2026 $440.7M

Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, consolidated balance sheet and statement of changes in equity. In won the bridge closes exactly: ₩624,966,182,864 + ₩16,828,894,624 + ₩2,160,028,224 − ₩51,244,601,235 = ₩592,710,504,477. Each dollar figure is rounded independently, so the USD column adds to $440.6M against the $440.7M shown; the won column is exact, and $440.7M is the rounded conversion of ₩592,710,504,477. Converted at ₩1,345.06/$1 (as of Sep 7, 2026).

This is what the Korea Discount looks like from the inside: a state-controlled company doing genuinely world-class engineering, distributing an asset sale at a 60% payout, with a board its majority shareholder appoints, not one share ever cancelled since listing, and no buyback since 2014.

🔗 How Concentrated Is the Customer Base?

Extremely: Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power alone was 48.4% of consolidated first-half 2026 revenue, related parties together were 57.2%, and 87.3% of trade receivables were owed by related parties.

The related-party note lists fourteen counterparties by name with three-month and cumulative columns. Cumulative service revenue for the six months to June 30, 2026 was $92.1M in total, of which $77.9M came from Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power; the prior-year comparatives are $83.4M and $59.8M (Source: DART rcpNo 20260814001293, note 37). A separate disclosure — the allowance-for-doubtful-accounts section’s breakdown of receivables by elapsed period (경과기간별 현황), not note 37 — shows related-party receivables of $214.1M against a total of $245.3M as of the same date, all of it under six months old.

Translated: related parties supplied 57.2% of revenue in H1 2026 (up from 54.4%), KHNP alone supplied 48.4% (up from 39.0%), and KHNP’s contribution grew 30.3% year on year. Concentration is rising, not falling — and the Czech contract, which is with KHNP, will push it further.

⚠️ The Bear Case

  • The valuation only works on a story, and the story is priced. At $3.48bn the market pays about 197× earnings excluding the disposal gain, and 7.9× a book value that is currently shrinking. The recurring return on equity is around 4%. There is no valuation support underneath the narrative.
  • This article’s own framing cuts both ways. We present the Czech order as the asset that matters — but it has delivered 3.2% of its value in six months and runs to April 2038. A $1.94bn order book that converts at roughly $86M a year from its largest component does not justify a $3.48bn market cap on its own either. The bull case genuinely does require something not yet in the filings.
  • The domestic pipeline is rolling off. Management’s own filing blames FY2025’s operating decline on Shin-Hanul 3&4 schedule delays and Saeul 3&4 nearing completion. Saeul 3&4 design work ends in November 2026, and the UAE architect-engineering contract ends in December 2026 with $3.6M of value left.
  • Nearly a tenth of the order book cannot legally start. The Wangsin fuel-cell EPC ($148.5M, contracted November 2022) and the Sinan Eupdong ESS EPC ($31.5M) both show zero or near-zero completion because the client has not issued a notice to proceed; the ESS contract additionally states it may be terminated if project financing fails.
  • Governance is state governance. A majority shareholder that appoints the board, three extraordinary general meetings replacing six directors in ten weeks, no share ever cancelled in sixteen years as a listed company, and an August 2026 appellate conviction of a former standing director that added a foreign-bribery count the first-instance court had thrown out.
  • Earnings quality is poor in both directions. FY2025 net income was 72.2% a property gain at the pre-tax line; FY2024’s operating profit was restated upward when government R&D income moved above the operating line. Neither year’s headline number means what a screener will assume it means.
  • A worker died on an overseas posting; the case itself is closed. The company disclosed a fatality at staff accommodation in Constanța, Romania on June 22, 2026, and disclosed on June 29 that the responsible agency under the Ministry of Employment and Labour — the filing says only 해당청, “the relevant agency,” and does not name it — had determined on June 26 that the death did not arise from a breach of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, so it was excluded from investigation and the matter closed. The filing carrying that determination is titled, in Korean, “notification of exclusion from serious-accident determination and closure.” It sits in this list as a marker of operational risk on overseas deployments, not as an open liability (Sources: DART rcpNo 20260623800668, the accident report, and rcpNo 20260629800796, the closure notice).

📚 Lingo Check

Term What it means Korean
Architect-engineering (A/E) Design of the whole power plant — buildings, layout, turbine island, balance of plant. Distinct from designing the reactor itself. 종합설계
NSSS design Nuclear steam supply system design: the reactor, coolant loops and safety systems — the nuclear island. Usually a separate contract from A/E. 원자로계통설계
Design certification (NRC DC) A US rule certifying a reactor design as acceptable for American use, so it can be referenced in a licence application. It permits; it does not order. The APR1400’s was codified as 10 CFR Part 52, Appendix F in 2019. 표준설계인증
Notice to proceed (NTP) The client’s instruction that actually starts work. A signed EPC contract without an NTP sits in the order book earning nothing. 착수지시서
Public institution A company designated under Korea’s Act on the Management of Public Institutions. Executive appointments run through a statutory nomination committee and the supervising ministry, and worker directors are permitted. 공공기관
Assets held for sale An asset a company has committed to sell, reclassified out of fixed assets. When it settles, the gain lands in one line and can dwarf operating profit — as it did here. 매각예정자산
High-dividend company A tax designation under Article 104-27 of the Restriction of Special Taxation Act, granted on payout ratio and dividend growth, which Korean issuers flag in Value-Up filings. 고배당기업

🎯 Why It Matters for K-Export Stars

Every fact in this article was public on the day it was filed, and all of it was in Korean. The gap between what a screener shows for KEPCO E&C — net income up, a 60% payout, a nuclear exporter — and what the filings show — four-fifths of that profit from an office building, a payout that shrank book value, one unlisted customer at 48.4% of revenue — is not an information gap. It is a language gap, and closing it is what this site is for.

It also sharpens a rule worth carrying across the Korean export complex: when an export story breaks, ask which listed entity actually holds the contract, then read that entity’s own order table instead of the headline. The same discipline applies to the MASGA shipbuilding package, where a comparable narrative runs through a different set of Korean tickers.

Conclusion

KEPCO E&C is a genuinely rare asset: the only company that designs both halves of a Korean reactor, with a €939.6M Czech order book running to 2038 and an operating business that is quietly improving — first-half 2026 gross profit up 35.4%, operating profit up 300%.

It is also a $3.48bn market capitalisation on roughly $17.7M of recurring earnings, a dividend funded by selling a head office, a customer base that is 48.4% one unlisted state company, and a board its 51.24% state parent appoints.

Those two descriptions are both true, and an investor has to decide which one the price is paying for. The filings do not settle that — they only make sure you are arguing about the right numbers. For the rest of the Korean nuclear chain, start with our Doosan Enerbility deep dive — the company on the other side of KEPCO E&C’s Czech reactor-system contract.

Also in this series — the Korean nuclear supply chain, read from the filings

Each company is covered on its own filings. We have not published a sector view, because four companies are not a sector.

Where this company sits in the chain

Our filing map places all four listed suppliers by how many contractual steps separate them from the utility that signs — and shows why you cannot add their contract values together: Korea’s Nuclear Export Chain: What the Filings Show.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and is not investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Figures are sourced from DART regulatory filings, Korea Exchange settled market data, the Korea Investment & Securities Open API and the cited authorities as of the dates stated; prices, valuations and flows change and may be out of date by the time you read this. Currency conversions use ₩1,345.06/$1 and ₩1,559.22/€1 — the September 7, 2026 daily observations of the USD/KRW and EUR/KRW spot series. One caveat we owe you: the FinanceDataReader series we pull labels these two values September 6, because that series’ date index runs one day early; Yahoo Finance’s KRW=X and EURKRW=X return the identical values against September 7, which is the date used here. We checked the level itself against the Bank of Korea‘s official base rate (매매기준율), first quoted each morning off the previous session’s interbank trading: the rates first quoted on September 8, 2026 were ₩1,342.60 to the dollar and ₩1,561.04 to the euro — 0.18% and 0.12% away from the figures used here. Ratios described as our calculations are derived, not filed. Do your own research and consult a licensed financial adviser before investing. K-Export Stars publishes a corrections policy.

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