This year has been another notable year for South Korean e-commerce firm Coupang, which most recently secured an additional $2 billion investment from Softbank.

From a company with a revenue of 348.4 billion won ($309.4 million) in 2014, the company expanded threefold in revenue in just a year, and went on to become the first e-commerce company in Korea to break through the 1 trillion won mark in sales. In 2017, it marked 2.685 trillion won in sales. This year, Coupang expects to reap 5 trillion won in revenue, a whopping 14-fold surge in four years since the first round of investment from Softbank.

The second round of investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund will be injected into consumer-first technology including its logistics network.

SoftBank’s latest investment is the largest amount ever received by a South Korean online retailer.

“The vision and leadership that Coupang CEO Kim Bom has shown is leading the South Korean e-commerce scene, also making Coupang one of the world’s most innovative companies,” said SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son in a statement in November.

Founded in 2010, Coupang is the largest and fastest-growing online retailer here in terms of items sold online. It offers over 120 million products, including 4 million items available for next-day delivery through its Rocket service. As of September, an accumulated 1 billion items had been delivered via the Rocket service.

Coupang CEO Kim Bom has vowed to continue to invest in developing Coupang’s logistics, payment platforms and data.

Some of Coupang’s recent innovations include Rocket Fresh, a delivery service that sends organic food products to consumers within hours after purchase. The service is currently available in Seoul, Incheon and most of Gyeonggi Province.

In October, it also launched a subscription service called Rocket Wow club, which offers free delivery of items with overnight arrivals for members only. Products can be returned anytime within 30 days of purchase, free of charge. A week after the service was launched, some 150,000 customers had signed up.

Earlier this month, industry data showed that South Korean mobile shoppers used e-commerce platform Coupang the most in October, which saw about a 23 percent increase in the number of its monthly active users.

According to mobile application analysis company Wise App’s survey conducted on 23 million Android phone users here, 8.18 million of them had used Coupang for mobile shopping in the last month.


By Korea Herald (khnews@heraldcorp.com)