Mobile commerce is REAL here in Seoul
Behind Coupang’s +$1B valuation
Coupang, which started back in 2010 as a Groupon clone in Seoul, recently secured $100M funding at above $1B valuation from Sequoia capital.
Here are couple articles covering the funding:
- New York Times: http://goo.gl/FupllU
- Venturebeat: http://goo.gl/9R4XKf
Along with the news, there are some eye-catching numbers on the state of mobile commerce in Korea. (Source: Statistics Korea)
- $14B expected to be the total number for 2014
- Mobile close to 30% of e-commerce market (vs. 13% in the US)
- 44% of total population(21.63M) already shops on mobile devices
Almost half of the country is buying stuffs on mobile devices, and each shopper spends around $600 annually.
Back to Coupang’s success.
- Top3 social commerce companies (aka flash deals) already have surpassed 60% mark — mobile share of total sales
- These companies have successfully evolved into a general e-commerce marketplace, competing with traditional players such as Ebay
- Mobile-first strategy have worked remarkably well — curated, personalized deals in mobile-optimized user interface have really put them ahead of competition along with behavioral shift of consumers
- Guaranteed next-day delivery(now this has already become a standard in Korea), and pushing out same-day delivery aggressively enabled new categories such as food and household supplies to ‘go mobile’
It would be exciting to see how Coupang compete with Ebay in South Korea. Ebay acquired Gmarket and Auction previously — established ‘dominant’ position in e-commerce in the desktop world. Stay tuned.
*Personally, I enjoy watching people in the subway during 1-hour subway commute every morning. Obviously, 80% of people are looking at their Android/iPhone screen. Taking a closer look, I discovered it’s either 1. reading/watching content, 2. playing games, 3. shopping — everyone’s sending messages in between doing those 3 activities.
