Coupang Founder Is South Korea’s Second-Youngest Billionaire
Coupang founder Bom Kim becomes South Korea's second-youngest billionaire as the e-commerce company that he established in 2010 made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Thursday.
The company has the second biggest listing in the NYSE, after Alibaba, for an Asian company.
The Initial Public Offering (IPO) of the company is recorded as the biggest this year in the United States, next to Uber Technologies that raised $8.1 bn in 2019.
Coupang reached a market cap of $84.47 bn (£6.1bn) when it sold 130 million stocks with the initial price range of $32-$34 (£22-£24) per piece when it began, then the price increased to $63.50 (£45.43) per share when the trading opened and closed at $49.25 (£35.31).
The company's revenue doubled up in 2020, during the pandemic when online shopping became a trend. The company also became more popular when it offered "next-day," "same-day," and even "dawn" delivery to millions of items and groceries in South Korea with no extra charge. The company reported $12bn (£8.6bn) revenue in 2020.
Bom Kim founded the company Coupang, South Korea's Amazon, in 2010 when he dropped out of Harvard business school to come back home and start his own e-commerce business in South Korea.
The Japanese multinational company SoftBank is one of the biggest investors of Coupang with a vision fund of 35 percent of shares in it. Some other companies that invested in Coupang are Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, among others.
"We were fortunate to have demand from a lot of great investors and we didn't have room for all of the great investors out there," Kim said.
Currently, the South Korean e-commerce market is the seventh-largest and one of the fastest-growing worldwide. It is expected to continue to grow as the demand for online shopping continuously dominates the market, especially when the pandemic is still happening.
