Coupang Looks To Raise Up To $3.6 Billion By Going Public

Coupang Inc. is looking to bring in up to $3.6 billion in investment funds by going public in New York. The online shopping firm intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol of CPNG, Bloomberg reported.

South Korea-based Coupang and some of its current investors are offering 120 million shares priced at between $27 and $30 apiece. The company would be valued at up to $51 billion based on the count of outstanding stock at the high end of the spectrum.

While Coupang is providing 100 million new Class A shares in the initial public offering (IPO), current investors are providing 20 million shares. Every Class A share gets a single vote, and the founder-held Class B shares get 29 votes.

SoftBank Group Corp. would receive a windfall from a fruitful public offering. The company backed Coupang in 2015 with a $1 billion investment, while its Vision Fund invested $2 billion in 2018.

CEO Bom Kim established Coupang, which is referred to as “Korea’s Amazon,” in 2010. The executive, who left Harvard University before graduating, had long mulled over a public offering, but postponed it in order to concentrate on expanding the company.

The news comes as Coupang filed its much-awaited IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Feb. 12. To get a picture of how fast revenues can take flight during a pandemic: Coupa’s filing shows that from the start of 2018 to the conclusion of the 2020, quarterly revenues jumped by four times, from the USD equivalent of approximately $900 million to $3.8 billion. Coupang estimates in the filing that it has only a sliver of the overall retail, grocery, consumer foodservice and travel spend in the Korean market, which was $470 billion in 2019 and is anticipated to expand to $534 billion by 2024.