Coupang, Inc. (NYSE:CPNG) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

We’re seeing strong adoption and retention with merchants. And customers enjoy more services, more selection on Rocket services like Dawn and Rocket Returns, which we believe unlocks considerable growth for merchants and attracts even more selection and merchants to FLC, which in turn expands the value of FLC for customers, for example, accelerating the flywheel. But there’s a lot of long-term benefits that we will continue to see, and seeing any quarterly snapshot of margins is really a blend of these initiatives. Some of it is affected by expenses that are one-time in nature associated with new merchant acquisition or new selection.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Seyon Park with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Seyon Park: Hi. Thank you for the opportunity. My question is on the Developing Offerings. We’ve clearly seen a meaningful increase in revenues on a quarter-on-quarter basis. Can you maybe provide us with a little bit of a breakdown of what led to that increase? And then I think, Bom, you mentioned that the unit economics for Coupang Eats is positive, in which case, if Coupang Eats did see a meaning growth, then theoretically, that should lead to, I guess, lowered losses for Developing Offerings. So if you can just help us kind of reconcile that. If it is the case that Eats is actually – or the losses are narrowing for Eats, but maybe it’s been Taiwan or maybe on the Play side that has led to the larger losses, if that is the case. Or if my logic is wrong here, you can correct me, that would be great. Thank you.

Bom Kim: Hi, Seyon, thanks for all the questions. As we’ve noted, we are seeing strong momentum in both Taiwan and Eats. I’ll start with Taiwan. It’s only been a year in Taiwan since we’ve launched Rocket Delivery. But our growth in that first year has been faster in Taiwan than it was in Korea. And as you know, we remain very confident in the overall model of Rocket Delivery. We’ve been delighted by the customer response so far. We still have a lot of work to do to not only build the kind of customer experience we want there, but also the operational experience, the excellence, that we’ve set our sights on. And as you continue to see us improve customer experience and improve operational excellence, you should see us able to capture growth and profits, not one at the expense of each other, as we’ve demonstrated in our first market, Korea.

On Eats, our Eats savings program on WOW is yielding strong results to date. As we mentioned, transaction volumes have doubled in the majority of regions where we’ve launched the program. WOW members purchasing on Eats has also increased 90%. The number of regions where we’re the number one food delivery service has also increased. And just 20% of all our members are purchasing Eats in Q3, so we have a long runway for growth ahead. And of course, the impact of Eats extends also to our broader WOW membership program and Product Commerce offerings. Higher engagement on Eats expands our customer engagement across all services in our ecosystem, increasing acquisition retention and reducing attrition of WOW members. WOW members spend significantly higher than non-WOW members.

We’ve observed WOW members who purchase Eats spend twice as much overall as WOW members who don’t purchase Eats in the regions where we’ve launched this program. So there’s a lot of beneficial accretive things to the overall ecosystem that we’ve seen with Eats. But even as a stand-alone offering, as we mentioned, Eats is unit economics positive. There are one-time setup costs like newer merchant acquisition, and we’ve been onboarding – one of the less talked about aspects of Eats is that we’ve onboarded a lot of new merchants and lots of new selection and expanded the value of Eats beyond the savings program for our customers. But the unit economic trends that we continue to see give us more confidence about the potential of Eats. And the customer response, which we’ve been delighted by, makes us even more committed and excited to make the Eats savings program a permanent benefit of WOW membership.