Coupang grows together with partner companies
Small partner companies who sell their products through e-commerce platform Coupang logged an 81 percent growth rate and 2.65 trillion won ($2.23 billion) in sales last year, signaling the online shopping giant’s business is contributing to the growth of domestic SMEs, a report showed Sunday.
Coupang recently published its “2019 Coupang Mini Business Impact Report” along with accounting firm Samjong KPMG that analyzed the socioeconomic values of small companies offering their products through it. The analyzed firms, which the report called “mini businesses,” included those posting annual revenue of up to 3 billion won.
According to the report, more than 10,000 mini businesses were newly affiliated with Coupang every year, and their total number now surpasses 50,000.
Their growth rate stood at 81 percent last year, far surpassing Coupang’s 61 percent and the entire Korean e-commerce market’s 18 percent.
The report showed that the platform has also contributed to the boosting of the economy in the nonSeoul area, as 60 percent of mini businesses were based outside the capital and grew three times faster than their counterparts in Seoul.
By region, those in Hoengseong, Gangwon Province, expanded 30 times faster than their counterparts in Seoul. The number of products offered by partner companies in Sejong were three times more than the national average.
The growth of partner companies have also played a key role in driving job creation. The report said more than 320,000 jobs were created by mini businesses last year, a figure that exceeds the total jobs created by Korea’s top 10 conglomerates in the second half of last year.