South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang made its biggest stock market debut since the start of the year on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, earning a valuation of around $ 100 billion after its launch on the market.
Coupang, known as the “Korean Amazon”, entered the US stock market with a starting price of 35 dollars and began to trade at 63.50 dollars a share, achieving a rise of more than 80 percent and a capitalization close to 108,000 million, although later it was moderated.
It is the largest stock market debut in the United States of a foreign company since the historic exit of the Chinese group Alibaba in 2014, according to specialized media, and also stands out among the nearly 300 that have already taken place on Wall Street in 2021.
The firm was created in 2010 by South Korean mogul Bom Kim and is backed by Japanese tech group SofBank, whose venture capital arm Vision Fund owns more than a third of the shares.
In recent years it has become one of the three largest employers in its country, with almost 50,000 employees and an extensive distribution network of 100 logistics centers spanning 30 cities, promising rapid delivery to its customers and a return simple.
Coupang has benefited, like other firms in its sector, from the confinement stage of the pandemic, which doubled its turnover to almost 12,000 million dollars in fiscal year 2020, although it had a loss of 567 million, according to the documents. that he gave to the Securities Market Commission in the United States.
An hour and a half before the end of the session on the New York Stock Exchange, where it is traded under the CPNG label, its shares rose almost 56% to $ 54.60.
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