Coupang, Inc. (NYSE:CPNG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Bom Kim : On your first topic of FLC, as we mentioned in the call, FLC exceeded our expectations in 2022 and is already starting to scale. Of course, leverages our end 10 integrated network allows us to share the speed and efficiency with merchants to help them capture growth and savings. And parallel, of course, allows us to gain even better economies of scale efficiency gains there as well. Helps customers gain access to even wider selection with the experience of Rocket that we believe will ultimately unlock considerable growth over the long term. We mentioned the adoption rates for merchants and customers alike are strong on FLC. So far early results show that merchants who moved their inventory to FLC saw sales increase by over 65% on average.

Like any new initiative, there is a lead time to perfect the tools and technology processes and infrastructure to scale FLC to its full potential. But we’re very excited about the long term opportunity here. On Eats, we’ve made significant progress in Eats the $110 million year-over-year gross profit improvement in developing offerings which primarily driven by improvements in Eats. We’re also working relentlessly and have many efforts and many initiatives to improve aspects of the customer experience on Eats. Eats is a strategically important offering for us now and in the future, among other benefits like our Fresh offering, Eats help deepen our customer engagement across many services. There is a lot more to do, but we are excited about the strong profitable foundation we are building for Eats.

But we are excited about driving the next phase of growth on that stronger foundation at the right time.

Operator: And we will take our next question from James Lee with Mizuho Securities. Please go ahead.

James Lee: Great. Thanks for taking my question. Two here please. First on consumer demand, with South Korea right now facing some inflationary pressure, are you seeing any of the mix shift to maybe services, very similar to U.S. or maybe trade downs by consumers? And second, and maybe can we get a sense, maybe some puts and takes on developing offering for 2023, what segments do you feel like you need to double down and maybe what segment do you look to be more rational? Any commentary regarding the $200 million losses that you incurred this year, how should we think about 2023 on that? Thank you.

Bom Kim: Okay. Hi, James. Thanks for your question. I think on consumer demand, that was your first question, there are economic uncertainties globally that affect all of us. But as you have seen, we continue to grow much faster in the market, continue to grow at a robust pace. We are at different stages of selection acquisition across categories, but we are early in the selection acquisition for nearly every category. You see that in our customer cohort behaviour. The spend of our customer cohorts, even our oldest continues to compound at a fast rate. We are seeing strong growth across all categories, even our largest, maybe perhaps because of the stage that we are at selection acquisition. It is hard to isolate the macroeconomic impact at a category level.

Seeing our all of our cohorts continue to compound, all of our categories continue to grow, we still don’t know what our full potential spend is for our customers in any category. But it’s very clear that, customers want low prices, fast delivery and selection in all categories. And those are the three levers that we will continue to focus on. We have not yet seen an exception to this simple truth. And we believe that, our growth in the future will be driven by these three levers. On Developing Offerings, we remain excited about the potential to unlock significant gains in these new areas of growth. We believe the benefits of which will be amplified by our broader ecosystem. We will continue to be disciplined and intelligent in the way that we have approached developing offerings.

And you will see that our Developing Offering losses for 2023 will be consistent as Gaurav mentioned with the amount of investment we made in 2022.