Bom Kim sold his first venture fresh out of college. Fast forward two decades, and the serial entrepreneur is joining the ranks of the world’s richest with the listing of his Coupang Inc.
Shares of the e-commerce giant, backed by SoftBank Group Corp., surged as they began trading in New York on Thursday. The South Korean company—dubbed “Korea’s Amazon”—is valued at more than $95 billion, giving Kim, 42, a stake worth almost $10 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Coupang is Korea’s largest listing and the biggest by an Asian company on a U.S. exchange since Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. While it’s still loss-making, revenue almost doubled last year as the pandemic boosted online shopping.
“Our slogan from the early days of the company was to create a world where customers ask this one question, which is ‘How do I ever live without Coupang?’” Kim said in a panel discussion organized by the Milken Institute in 2019. He went on to say it was investors such as SoftBank that helped Coupang embark on building a “long-term play” for customers.
The company priced its share offering above a marketed range, raising $4.6 billion and valuing the company at approximately $60 billion. Its shares traded as high as $69 on Thursday before dropping to $56.80 at 12:43 p.m. in New York, 62% above its offering price.
SoftBank is the largest Coupang shareholder with a 35% stake worth more than $32 billion. The Japanese conglomerate injected $1 billion in Coupang in 2015, and its Vision Fund put in another $2 billion three years later.
Other early investors include BlackRock Inc., Neil Mehta’s Greenoaks Capital and Rose Park Advisors, a venture capital firm co-founded by late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen and his son, Matt. They led a $300 million financing round in 2014 and their combined stake is now worth almost $15 billion.
Coupang is said to have handpicked a limited number of investors for the IPO allocation. An unusually large proportion of investors who placed orders ended up getting no allocation, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
A Coupang representative declined to comment for this story.
Born in Seoul, Kim moved to the U.S. when he was in middle school and later obtained U.S. nationality. While doing government studies at Harvard University, he started a student publication called Current Magazine discussing ideas from writers across colleges, which he sold to Newsweek in 2001. After trying other ventures -- he sold another media company in 2009 -- and dropping out of a Harvard MBA, he went back to Korea. Inspired by Groupon Inc.’s business model, he set up Coupang in 2010, and the company grew to become the nation’s first unicorn in 2014.