NH Investment & Securities said on the 7th that, together with Koscom, it has independently developed NHICS (NH Industry Classification Standard), an industry classification system tailored to the Korean stock market, the first of its kind among domestic securities firms.
NHICS is part of a strategy, pursued continuously since President Yun Byeong-un took office, to strengthen data-driven decision-making and research competitiveness. It was developed to move beyond competition focused on short-term product performance, enhance structural understanding of the domestic capital market, and build investment infrastructure that market participants across the board can use.
NH Investment & Securities handled the design of the industry classification system and the classification of listed companies, while Koscom took charge of external provision and the actual calculation of industry indexes. NH Investment & Securities said this is the first time in Korea that a securities firm and a financial IT specialist institution have combined their respective expertise to jointly develop an industry classification system.
NHICS is an industry classification system that organizes domestic listed companies into a three-tier structure of major categories (13), mid categories (31), and subcategories (73), designed to identify industry performance more clearly and three-dimensionally. It features an active reflection of the structure of Korea's capital market, its industry characteristics, and the actual perspective of investors.
It also separates the secondary battery industry—highly significant in the domestic stock market—into its own major category. Under existing industry classification systems, secondary battery companies were included in the IT industry, creating limits where industry performance became mixed; NHICS enables clearer analysis of performance by industry. It also reflects the structure of Korea's capital market by, for example, designating holding companies as a separate major category to reflect domestic corporate governance and market realities.
In addition, it actively adopts terms that investors can intuitively understand—such as "platform"—instead of the term "two-way media and services," improving information accessibility and usability compared with abstract global classification terms.
Yun Byeong-un, president of NH Investment & Securities, said, "As an industry classification system that enhances structural understanding of the domestic capital market, we plan to make it easy to use for a wide range of market participants, including pension funds, institutional investors, and retail investors."