For the record LTC distribution is actually worse than BTC. This address:
https://bitinfocharts.com/litecoin/address/3J5KeQSVBUEs3v2vEEkZDBtPLWqLTuZPuD holds 10.95% of all litecoins.
All coins that were launched in the early days have bad distribution because there were very few miners back then. In any system you are going to have some centralisation of wealth simply due to the early adopter effect.
Disclaimer: I do not hate litecoin.
At least not initially. Litecoin is probably one of the fairest coins upon launch.
Take a look at this keynote by Charlie Lee (coblee) about how this was done:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yi845h24aTQ. This meant that there was initially a larger number of miners who started mining.
The top 5 addresses are all held by big exchanges (cold wallets); if I remember correctly the top 1 address was held by Huobi. With Bitcoin, this might not be so obvious, but Coinbase claims to hold a larger number of BTC in cold storage. + same with Bitcoin too (Chinese exchanges)...
It makes sense that exchanges handle some of the largest amount of currency, since that's where trading occurs.