Hyunrock Han of HYBE JAPAN on growing from 20 to 300 employees and launching &TEAM

HYBE JAPAN's quiet architect

Hyunrock Han, representative director and CEO of HYBE JAPAN, made his first appearance on Billboard's 2026 Global Power Players list, a recognition reserved for music executives driving business outside the United States. The honor comes after six years of steady, sometimes painful, organizational work that took the company from fewer than 20 employees to roughly 300.

From finance to K-pop

Han's path to the music industry was anything but conventional. He spent his career in management strategy across finance, manufacturing, and trading companies before joining Big Hit Entertainment (now HYBE) in 2019. A mutual friend introduced him to HYBE founder and board chairman Si-Hyuk Bang, and that conversation changed the direction of his career. About six months after joining the Korean headquarters, he was asked to relocate to Japan. His condition before accepting: three years of unconditional trust from leadership while he reshaped the organization.

Rebuilding from the ground up

When Han arrived at what was then Big Hit Solutions Japan, HYBE was outsourcing nearly every operation, live production, pop-up stores, merchandise, fan club management, through external partners. Han saw a structural problem: data and institutional knowledge were not accumulating inside the company. His first move was to bring each function in-house, hiring specialists from retail, merchandising, and loyalty business backgrounds rather than limiting recruitment to music industry veterans.

He also spent more than a year connecting fragmented customer data sets, cross-referencing concert attendance with album purchases and pop-up store behavior, to build a data-driven decision loop. According to Billboard, that continuous improvement process is at the core of how the organization grew.

&TEAM and the Japan-to-global bet

The second pillar of Han's mandate was developing &TEAM, HYBE's first localized act created by one of its international headquarters rather than its Korean base. He describes the process as uncharted territory: the team reviewed more than 50 properties just to find a rehearsal space, and built trainee contracts from zero.

Han took over as label head at YX LABELS in June 2025, stepping into a group that had already set a "Japan to Global" ambition. He acknowledged that communicating both the Japanese identity of the act and its international aspirations at the same time presented a real challenge, one his team was working to untangle through clearer, more consistent artist strategy work.

What he tells his employees

Ask Han what makes a good team member and he gives two answers: interpersonal excellence and problem-solving ability. The first, he says, can take many forms, passion, logic, natural charm, but the outcome is always the same: moving people toward something new. The second is about resilience. No plan survives contact with reality, and the ability to troubleshoot when things go sideways is, in his view, non-negotiable.

Six years in, Han admits he is not sure he could do it all over again. That honesty, more than any organizational chart, says something about the scale of what was built.