Total Soft Bank (KOSDAQ: 045340, 토탈소프트뱅크) is a Busan-based maritime software house whose terminal operating system, CATOS, runs more than 110 container terminals in over 20 countries. It has a market value of roughly ₩57bn and holds about ₩34bn of that in cash.
If you’ve ever watched a giant container ship get unloaded, those towering cranes plucking forty-ton boxes off the deck like Lego bricks, there’s a decent chance the software choreographing that ballet was written in Busan, South Korea.
Despite the name, Total Soft Bank has nothing to do with the Japanese telecom-and-investing giant SoftBank. It’s a 37-year-old maritime-software house founded in 1988 and listed on the KOSDAQ since 2002, and it has spent its entire life solving one unglamorous, fiendishly hard problem: how do you run a port?