Tmon, an e-commerce platform in South Korea, promised Friday to turn profit this year as it marks its 10th anniversary.

With the goal of going public, the firm’s Chief Executive Officer Lee Jin-won revealed his ambition to lead the e-commerce market.

“Tmon is a company that has been labeled the most as ‘the industry’s first,’ in Korea’s e-commerce market. We started as the country’s first social-commerce (provider), and now created the title ‘time-commerce,’” Lee said.

“Now, by listing on the stock exchange for the first time as an e-commerce company, we seek to become a company with permanence, to operate 20, 30 years from now.”

“We will make efforts so that the 2020 becomes the first year for our turnaround.

Tmon started off as a social commerce provider in 2010, in which it sold discount tickets that can be used in stores in only one region every midnight, on its online platform.

Around the end of 2018, the company presented itself under a new concept of “time-commerce,” where it would offer tens of thousands of products at discounted prices on its platform around the clock.

Since then, its sales increased gradually in the last two years to record the company’s first-ever monthly turnaround in March this year, Tmon said. Last year, the company recorded a deficit of 75 billion won ($60.6 million), cutting its annual loss by half from a year earlier.

According to the company, it has recorded a 187 percent increase in sales revenue and a 217 percent increase in sales volume as of this month, compared to December 2018. It also witnessed the number of its customers grow by 26 percent during the period.

By Jo He-rim (herim@heraldcorp.com)