Hancom (030520.KQ) is reshaping itself from an office software maker into an artificial intelligence company, building AI into a new source of earnings. Its AI revenue in the first half of this year has already surpassed the full-year figure for 2025, and at the end of the year the company will launch a subscription business in the United States for Nomadian, its AI workforce platform. If Hancom secures annual recurring revenue abroad after demonstrating that AI can be profitable at home, the yardstick used to value the company could change as well.
Hancom posted revenue of 98.6 billion won and operating profit of 31 billion won on a separate basis in the first half, according to IT industry sources on the 8th. The operating margin reached 31.5%. Of that, AI revenue came to 13.47 billion won, exceeding the 8.91 billion won recorded for all of 2025 in just six months. Cumulative AI revenue had already passed last year's full-year total in May, when it reached 10.3 billion won — about a year after the company began selling AI packages.
The share of AI in total revenue is also growing quickly. AI accounted for 11.4% of sales in the first quarter and rose to 15.7% in the second. Rather than releasing new office packages from the second half of last year, the company combined AI features with its existing subscription services, a strategy that is now showing up in revenue. Hancom says that adding AI on top of its existing customer base allows it to expand AI revenue while keeping down the sales costs of acquiring new customers.
The share of existing office customers converting to AI-bundled products rose from 4.2% in the first quarter to 6.2% in June. Microsoft disclosed 30 million paid Copilot seats in July, which works out to a conversion rate in the 6% range against roughly 450 million commercial seats. That puts Hancom's AI conversion rate at a level comparable to the world's largest office software provider. With about 200,000 existing customers, including central government ministries, education offices and companies, Hancom still has room for further conversions.
The company has maintained profitability while expanding its AI business. On a separate basis, Hancom posted record revenue of 175.3 billion won and operating profit of 50.9 billion won last year, for an operating margin of 29.0%. Its targets for this year are revenue of 210 billion won and operating profit of 60 billion won, implying an operating margin of 28.6%. The figures suggest the company is lifting the AI share of revenue while preserving the earnings power built up in its existing office business.
The next test is the U.S. market. Hancom will release a beta version of Nomadian in the United States in late December. While its domestic AI business converts existing office customers to AI products, Nomadian charges U.S. users a monthly subscription fee. If the service takes hold, it will give Hancom a new stream of overseas annual recurring revenue.
Unlike one-time sales, ARR recurs for as long as a subscription is maintained. The more users sign up, the larger the revenue base the company can count on the following year. Because Nomadian collects subscription fees directly from U.S. users, it offers Hancom three growth elements at once: AI, overseas expansion and recurring revenue.
What determines recurring revenue is how long users stay with a service. Nomadian is designed so that the more an owner talks with AI employees and exchanges feedback with them, the more the AI learns that owner's way of working. Hancom calls its users "agent owners." Even with the same Nomadian product, accumulated interaction with an owner causes each AI team to develop differently.
"Agents grow into AI team members by interacting with users, much like a nurturing simulation game," Hancom CEO Kim Yeon-soo said. "The relationships that build up and the attachment to the characters will be the reason users stay with Nomadian." The longer the service is used, the more it is tailored to each user, embedding an incentive to stay in the structure of the product itself.
There are already cases in which AI-based recurring revenue has changed how a company is valued. Salesforce reported revenue of $11.345 billion and operating profit of $2.331 billion in the second quarter of fiscal 2027, covering May through July, for an operating margin of 20.5%. ARR for its Agentforce AI agent business topped $1.5 billion, up more than 240% from a year earlier, with figures including Slackbot from the second quarter. Tasks actually completed by agents, such as updating records and executing workflows, totaled 3.2 billion in the second quarter alone, up 97% from the previous quarter. Current remaining performance obligations, or contracted revenue expected to be recognized within the next 12 months, rose 14% from a year earlier to $33.5 billion.
The share price moved as well. Salesforce opened the year at $253.62 but fell to $156.66 by late June on concerns that AI could cannibalize its existing software business. The day after earnings showed AI recurring revenue growing in hard numbers, however, the stock jumped 22.6% in a single session. The market reassessed the company once results confirmed a structure in which AI agents handle real work and generate recurring revenue accordingly.
Analysts see Hancom as a different case because it is adding a U.S. subscription business on top of an AI operation that is already profitable at home. Cash and cash equivalents on a separate basis, including short-term financial instruments, stood at 114.9 billion won at the end of the second quarter, up 42.9 billion won from the end of last year. That gives the company profits and cash from its existing business to fund the expansion of its overseas AI operations.
"Hancom has proved it can make money from AI in Korea and is now moving to the stage of building recurring revenue in the United States," an IT industry official said. "Once Nomadian starts accumulating subscription revenue, the standard for valuing Hancom will broaden from domestic earnings to growth as a global AI platform."
