Coupang swings to Q3 loss on warehouse fire-related costs
Seoul, Nov 4
E-commerce giant Coupang said on Wednesday it swung to a net loss in the third quarter from a year earlier, largely due to costs caused by a warehouse fire.
In the three months that ended in September, the US-listed company posted a net loss of 715.1 billion won (US$501 million) from a net profit of 131.6 billion won in the same period last year, it said in a press release.
The fire at a Coupang Fulfillment Center (FC) in Incheon, about 30 kilometers west of Seoul, in July weighed on the company's quarterly earnings, it said, reports Yonhap news agency.
The blaze was the second-longest-lasting warehouse fire in South Korea, following a 2021 fire at a Coupang distribution centre in Icheon, some 50 km southeast of Seoul, which burned for about 130 hours. Excluding FC fire-related costs, Coupang's net loss was 458.2 billion won, the company said.
Coupang has now reported net losses for three consecutive quarters this year, with the lingering fallout from a data breach also weighing on its earnings.
The U.S.-listed company, which generates most of its revenue in South Korea, has faced strong public backlash since disclosing in November 2025 a data breach that affected more than 37 million customers.
Sales in the Product Commerce segment, which represents its core online shopping business, rose 8 percent from a year earlier to 11.95 trillion won in the September quarter.
"Product Commerce is tracking toward the mid-next year recovery we laid out last quarter. We expect the reported growth and margins to approximate historical levels as we lap the affected periods (driven by the data incident) next year," Coupang founder and Chief Executive Kim Bom-suk said in a earnings conference call.
He said, however, that a small group of members who left the platform following the data incident had yet to return, continuing to weigh on the business, although new members had helped make up for the decline in membership.
Kim cited three temporary factors weighing on margins in the Product Commerce segment: supply chain headwinds, fixed-cost deleverage relative to pre-incident demand levels, and increased marketing investment to accelerate the return of customers who left following the data incident.
He said these factors were not structural and that Product Commerce margins were expected to return to pre-incident levels.
— IANS
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