Coupang Announces $2 Billion Investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund

By PRNewswire On Nov 21, 2018

Leading Consumer Internet Company More than Doubles Revenue in 2 Years Approaching $5 Billion in 2018

Coupang, one of the largest and fastest growing e-commerce companies in the world, announced that the SoftBank Vision Fund will invest $2 billion in Coupang. This follows SoftBank Group’s initial investment of $1 billion in June 2015. This new primary capital will enable Coupang to continue investing in consumer-first technology innovations.

Lydia Jett, Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers and Coupang Board member, said, “Coupang seeks to have a revolutionary technology platform and uncompromising focus on customer delight. We believe the company is well-positioned to lead the Korean e-commerce market, with significant platform opportunities ahead given its data, payments and logistics advantage.”

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With revenue more than doubling in the last two years and approaching $5 billion in 2018, Coupang is Korea’s largest online retailer. Korea is already a global top five e-commerce market and is one of the fastest growing. Coupang today offers more than 120 million items for sale, including 4 million retail items available for guaranteed one-day delivery through its Rocket delivery service, which by September 2018 had delivered more than 1 billion items. Millions of customers buy from Coupang more than 50 times per year, and one in every two Koreans has downloaded Coupang’s mobile application.

Coupang’s growth is propelled by technology. Rocket services deliver more than one million parcels every day and dynamically respond to surges in demand that sometimes double delivery volumes overnight. RocketPay, Coupang’s payment service (which is growing 200% year-over-year), makes buying easy, allowing millions of customers to make One-Touch purchases already worth billions of dollars a year. Coupang’s data platform helps customers discover more than 300 million items per day and renders search results in a fraction of a second.

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“At Coupang, we are obsessed with making customers’ lives easier,” said Bom Kim, CEO of Coupang. “We’re excited to continue our partnership with SoftBank. We are confident this investment will allow us to leverage the platforms we have created in logistics, payments, and data to make e-commerce and other innovations even more indispensable to our customers.”

Recent Coupang innovations include Dawn Delivery and Rocket Fresh. Dawn Delivery enables shoppers to place orders for millions of Rocket products as late as midnight and have them delivered to their door before 7AM. Rocket Fresh delivers perishable and organic items to consumers within hours of ordering and has been made available to more than half of Korea within 30 days of launch.