COUPANG

Founder: Bom Suk Kim
Key people: Bom Suk Kim (CEO)
Number of employees: ~10,000

Coupang is one of the most successful E-Commerce companies in South Korea. Coupang has accomplished its expansion by always innovating its services and looking for a better customer experience. More recently, Coupang has developed its mobile shopping platforms, same-day deliveries and personalized recommendations services.

Founder

Bomseok Kim was born in Seoul, and left Korea at the age of 7 with his father who worked abroad for Hyundai. He eventually attended Harvard.

After Harvard, Kim at first enrolled in the media business. His professional practices were at the New Republic and he then started a “the Current” student magazine. Newsweek bought his initiative a year after Kim graduated in 2000.

In year 2006 Kim raised $4 million for “02138” a Vanity Fair inspired Harvard alumni magazine which didn´t make it through the 2008 world economic crisis. Then, Kim attempted Harvard Business School in 2010 but lasted only a year.

Having studying at Seoul National University prior to his M.B.A. attempt.  At that point he knew he “wanted to start something in commerce in Korea”. Groupon’s daily-deal model was the trend and the easiest way to get funded. Kim returned to  Seoul and became dedicated to create a Groupon clone  to raise money from American investors more easily.

Kim registered Coupang in USA as a ltd. (limited liability corporation) and soon spent almost $1 million on ads. Coupang was Facebook’s top advertiser in South Korea.

Kim’s estimated 19% stake in Coupang is worth $950 million. It seems like he may be a billior soon. This has many people excited, especially in Korea where wealth is usually concertated on the few multi-billion, multi-generational businesses.

History

The company´s history is quite brief, shorter than 6 years long. It started in 2010 offering daily deals on services, but soon started partnering with dealers, wholesalers and selling physical goods. Now, the company possesses a way larger variety of good to merchandise including home goods and décor, consumables, , sporting goods, electronics, music, books and toys electronics, baby goods, fashion, beauty  and many more products. By now, it even possesses travel agency and cultural events tickets.

Coupang was created with the mission of offering goods, products and services. Quickly in 2010 Bomseok Kim founder CEO, saw the company become cash flow positive already at the end of 2011. Also, in the same year, Coupang released an app for Android and for iPhone. And as of May 2012 the company achieved monthly net profit.

Back then, Coupang counted with over 700 employees, with 25,000 signed up merchants selling goods and services on its marketplace and roughly 12 million subscribers. Coupang achieved in the Business Insider’s list “THE DIGITAL 100: The World’s Most Valuable Private Tech Companies” in October 2012. From 2013, its mobile sales boomed and accounted for more than half of the company’s sales. $160 million were raised in May 2014 from Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Greenoaks Capital Management, Sequoia Heritage, Altos Ventures, Rose Park Advisors, Maverick Capital, Clay Christensen, LaunchTime, Bill Ackman, and other U.S. Venture Capitalists Investors.

Last year, In June 2015, Coupang received an investment of $1 billion from Japan’s Softbank.

Coupang quickly achieved growth by: 1) always creating and innovating the services they provide. 2) They are always sure to make a better customer experience 3) they created a high quality mobile shopping platform 4) They offer same-day delivery for many orders and they work on customizing shopping recommendations

In 2016, Coupang has exceeded annual sales of $1 billion US dollars.

Coupang is the closest thing South Korea has to Amazon and in “several key ways it’s better” says Kim. Coupang and its founder, Kim, are the predominant reasons that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will avoid bringing Amazon to the country and its 51 million potential customers; he’s hoping to avoid repeating the China failure.

Coupang’s has its CEO founder Kim seal of drive, effort, intention, emotion and motivation on it. The mentality which Kim feed to his staff is to give more than others, to provide a better product, a better service than other whatever it takes and especially if you have to work more at it, so hours of 80 hours a week are a normal working time for many of Coupang-people. They are truly relentless and fully driven. Thus making it a better service company than its competitors.

Compared to Amazon which is trying to achieve fastest delivery by application of ideas as the use of outside contractors, the experimenting with Uber-like driver networks and even dreaming the idea of using flying drones to improve delivery times to hours. In truth, for Amazon same-day shipments are only available in only 27 metropolitan areas. Coupang manages to do it magnificently country-wide.

The competition is mainly by EBay’s subsidiaries named Gmarket and Auction Co., which also figure along with Coupang as the country´s largest online on demand shopping platform.