Market Kurly Decides Against Wall Street Listing
12 July, 2021
Grocery delivery app Market Kurly has decided to go public on the Korean stock market instead of Wall Street.
Markey Kurly said last Friday that it has attracted W225.4 billion in fresh investments and chose to go public on the Korean stock market "since our consumers as well as product manufacturers and vendors are all located in Korea" (US$1=W1,146).
Market Kurly had considered a Wall Street initial public offering after Coupang took the step in March. The engine behind its double-digit growth every year is overnight deliveries, where it delivers orders placed by 11:00 p.m. to the doors of customers by 7:00 a.m. the next morning. It became the first company to offer the service in 2015.
Last year its sales doubled to W953 billion, while 2.8 million new customers signed up to bring total membership to over 8 million at the end of May. But Market Kurly's transaction amount is only 1/20 the size of Coupang's and it lacks a major investor like SoftBank's maverick Vision Fund, which pumped trillions of won into Coupang.
Market Kurly said cumulative investments rose to W640 billion with the latest injection, while its corporate value increased 2.6 times over the past year to W2.5 trillion. It intends to use the investment to boost its data infrastructure to improve the efficiency of product outsourcing, inventory, order processing and delivery operations.
Market Kurly expanded its overnight deliveries to central Korea in May and plans to reach southern parts in the second half of this year.
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