The company will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with the symbol “CPNG”.
The bid surpasses Wall Street’s IPO of the dating app, which raised more than $ 2 billion last month. According to Dealogic, it is also one of the largest listings an Asian company has made on an American stock exchange.
Kim will personally value about $ 6 billion once her company goes public, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index.
Coupang is popular for its “rocket delivery” service, which promises customers free shipping in a few hours or the next day. But the company has also faced some criticism in South Korea of working conditions, which local media have linked to the deaths of two of its delivery workers.
Coupang has previously said that South Korean authorities reported that the death of Jang Deok-jun, who worked at one of his logistics centers, “was considered an occupational disease.”
“We extend our condolences and apologies to Mr. Jang. We offer our condolences to his family and will try to actively support his family,” the company said in a statement last month. “We will bring together the reforms we have been preparing … and we will do our best to create an environment where workers can work safely,” he added.
Coupang did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday on the second death.
Like many e-commerce companies, Coupang’s business has grown during the coronavirus pandemic as more people stay home and shop online. When the crisis began, the company’s next-day delivery orders went from just over 2 million to 3.3 million a day.
“We saw an increase in demand in all categories,” Kim told CNN in an interview last April.
Coupang lost about $ 475 million in 2020, an improvement over the $ 699 million net loss recorded the previous year, according to an SEC filing. But it has managed to impress investors.
“Coupang can set a new benchmark for global e-commerce companies in Asia and the United States and there are several key lessons that companies can learn from what Coupang has achieved,” according to Goodwater Capital, a California venture capital invested in start-up.
The loyalty and dominance of the company’s customers in South Korea suggest that “somehow, [it’s] outside Amazon even on Amazon, ”the firm wrote in a report Wednesday.
“A lot of things have to do with their innovations in the delivery model,” said Eric Kim, managing partner of Goodwater Capital, a member of Coupang’s board.
“They have something called delivery at dawn. If you place an order at midnight, you can get it at 7 a.m.,” he told CNN Business.
Meanwhile, interest in the IPO has been hot. Earlier, the company had said it would sell shares for between $ 27 and $ 30 each before walking between $ 32 and $ 34, and would eventually set a price of $ 35. It also increased the number of shares it planned to offer, from 120 to 130 million, including some from existing shareholders.
The buzz comes at a good time for SoftBank, Coupang’s main shareholder. The Japanese conglomerate has invested at least $ 3 billion in Coupang since 2015 and its vision fund owns more than 35% of the company. Its stake is now worth about $ 20 billion.
While technology stocks have experienced some volatility in recent weeks, they have generally i have been in an amazing race for the last year. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has seized the rally and asked companies in his portfolio to go public, suggesting they could help his fund put “golden eggs”.
– CNN’s Selina Wang and Jake Kwon contributed to this report.
