Founder Bom Kim apologizes again, says customer trust is top priority
Coupang logged another record year, despite profit being almost wiped out in the last quarter and reputational damage from a data breach involving some 33 million user accounts.
According to its earnings release Friday, the New York-listed e-commerce company posted $34.5 billion in sales and $473 million in operating profit last year, up 14 percent and 8 percent from 2024, respectively.
The firm generated $8.8 billion in sales and $8 million in operating profit in the October-to-December period, up 11 percent and down 97 percent, respectively, from the same quarter of 2024.
Coupang said the data incident, involving a former employee who illegally accessed information from more than 33 million user accounts and retained data from approximately 3,000 accounts, is estimated to have negatively impacted fourth-quarter earnings.
The company added, however, that recent figures suggest the impact on growth has stabilized and that performance was beginning to recover in the first quarter of this year.
“First, I want to apologize again for the concern and inconvenience this has caused,” Coupang Inc. CEO and founder Bom Kim said at the start of the earnings call, marking the second time he has apologized for the breach. His first apology came in a written statement late last year.
“There is nothing more serious at Coupang than failing to live up to our customers’ expectations. We know we have to do better, and we will,” he said.
Coupang’s product commerce business, which accounts for about 85 percent of total sales, generated $7.4 billion in net revenue, up 12 percent on a constant currency basis. The company said the growth rate was several percentage points lower than the 18 percent constant-currency growth reported in the third quarter, primarily due to a slowdown in December that “appears related to the data incident.”
The number of active customers in the product commerce segment reached 24.6 million in the fourth quarter, up 8 percent from a year earlier but slightly down from 24.7 million in the previous quarter. The company noted that while the quarter-over-quarter decline appears to be linked to the data breach, customer metrics have stabilized since late in the fourth quarter, with a large number of users reactivating their accounts and overall growth trends improving.
Harold Rogers, Coupang Korea’s interim CEO, reiterated that the leaked data has been deleted and that there is no evidence of harm resulting from the illegally accessed information.
“Importantly, there is no evidence that any of that data was ever viewed by anyone else. This is also supported by the fact that there have been zero confirmed instances of any of this customer data being exploited,” he said during the earnings call.
“We have retained multiple outside experts to monitor, among other places, the dark web and deep web, including CNSecurity. To date, there has been no detection of misuse of customer data attributable to the incident, nor is there evidence that any Coupang user data related to the incident exists on those sources.”
hwkan@heraldcorp.com
