Homeplus carried a ₩5T buyout debt for a decade — the credit downgrade called it in

In 2015, MBK Partners bought Homeplus from Tesco for ₩7.2 trillion ($4.9 billion) — one of Asia's largest leveraged buyouts, financed with ₩2.2 trillion of equity and ₩5 trillion of acquisition debt placed on the retailer's own balance sheet. For a decade, Korea's 126-store hypermarket chain serviced the capital structure built to buy it.

The math caught up in early 2025. Korea Investors Service cut Homeplus's corporate bond rating from A3 to A3 minus, citing declining profitability, heavy debt and uncertain competitiveness — and the downgrade did what downgrades in loan covenants do: it triggered mandatory early repayment of some borrowings. As of November 2024, the chain carried ₩5.31 trillion in net debt at a debt-to-equity ratio of 1,408.6%. On 4 March 2025, Homeplus filed for court-supervised corporate rehabilitation with the Seoul Bankruptcy Court.

The rehabilitation could not be assembled. In July 2026 the court scrapped the process, finding no concrete funding plan for the several hundred million dollars the restructuring needed and no buyer for the business; MBK, which had apologised publicly the previous September, faced regulator discipline over its handling of the investment. A ₩200 billion lifeline and an appeal kept the chain alive into late 2026. The LBO had priced Homeplus for growth it never had; the rating cut merely collected the difference.