Coupang retains profitability in Q4 despite slowing growth

Photo credit: Coupang

Coupang, considered the Amazon of South Korea, has reported a modest 5% revenue growth at US$5.3 billion for the fourth quarter of 2022. It remained profitable for the second consecutive quarter with a net income of US$102.1 million.

However, sales growth only logged a 5% increase to reach US$4.8 billion in Q4 2022. While the company still recorded a net loss of US$92 million for the full year, it is a major contrast to its US$1.5 billion loss over 2021.

“There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the future,” said Bom Kim, founder and CEO of Coupang. “Our investments in new moments of ‘wow’ in nascent initiatives like food delivery, video streaming, fintech, and international have the potential to unlock outsized value for customers and shareholders in promising new areas of growth.”

Established in 2010 by Kim, a Harvard Business School dropout, Coupang takes a leaf out of the Amazon playbook by prioritizing customers’ experiences and fast deliveries.

“We expect profitability to continue to improve with economies of scale and continued efforts to improve our technology and operations,” Kim noted in the company’s Q4 earnings call.

Part of this effort is Coupang’s heightened reliance on robots. In a fulfillment center in Daegu, the company uses robots for organizing and collecting goods, which they then hand to human employees.

The Daegu facility is just the first of many, with EJ Choi – regional director of fulfillment services – telling Bloomberg TV that Coupang could “easily replicate” the system in different locations.

See also: Can Coupang out-Amazon Amazon in Southeast Asia?