It's 10:30 on a Monday night, and Ashley Hackworth is putting the final touches on a personal project to make the world's biggest boy band a little bit bigger. Ms. Hackworth, who teaches English in South Korea, is on a Zoom call with five other fans of the Korean pop group BTS , planning a virtual meet-up for followers. An online game for the event still needs work. Someone has to reach out to local radio stations about media coverage. And who can contact potential sponsors? Their fan group will not be paid a dime for promoting the band. But without their efforts, and those of a vast network of other hyper-dedicated fans, the Korean company that manages BTS , Big Hit Entertainment, would not now be a multibillion-dollar enterprise. On Thursday, shares in the company will begin trading in South Korea, capping off the country's most hotly anticipated initial public offering since 2017. Institutional and retail investors across the world scrambled to get a piece of Big Hit before the listing, with hundreds of pre-orders for every share. Big Hit, which reported a profit of $86 million last year, is valued at around $4 billion, after raising more than… Read full this story
- Generation Flux’s Secret Weapon
- US Army Rangers reenact risky climb to honor D-Day heroes
- How Edward Snowden went from loyal NSA contractor to whistleblower
- 7 Secrets You Missed in the Final Star Wars Trailer
- German Army Lacks Combat Ready Tanks for NATO Ops – Reports
- 9 fascinating bits of secret history revealed in New Year declassified documents
- The Secrets Of Generation Flux
- ISIS poised for ‘devastating’ comeback thanks to secret billions and sleeper cells, new report warns
- How TripAdvisor changed travel
- Who We Are: An Inside Look at Our Writers and Their Workstations
BTS’s Loyal Army of Fans Is the Secret Weapon Behind a $4 Billion Valuation have 288 words, post on www.nytimes.com at October 14, 2020. This is cached page on Search. If you want remove this page, please contact us.