Coupang Record Earnings Data Breach

E-commerce giant Coupang reported a record-breaking year in sales, despite a significant drop in quarterly profit and a damaging data breach affecting approximately 33 million user accounts.

According to the company’s latest earnings report released Friday, Coupang, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, achieved $34.5 billion in revenue and $473 million in operating profit in the past year. This represents a 14 percent increase in sales and an 8 percent rise in operating profit compared to 2024.

However, the fourth quarter saw a substantial decrease in operating profit. Coupang generated $8.8 billion in sales and $8 million in operating profit between October and December, marking an 11 percent increase in sales but a 97 percent decrease in operating profit compared to the same period in 2024.

Coupang attributed the sharp decline in fourth-quarter earnings partly to the recent data breach. A former employee illegally accessed data from over 33 million user accounts, retaining information from about 3,000 accounts.

The company stated that preliminary figures indicate the negative impact on growth is stabilizing, and performance is showing signs of recovery in the first quarter of the current year.

“First, I want to apologize again for the concern and inconvenience this has caused,” said Coupang Inc. CEO and founder Bom Kim at the beginning of the earnings call. This marks his second apology for the breach, following a written statement issued late last year.

“There is nothing more serious at Coupang than failing to live up to our customers’ expectations. We know we have to do better, and we will,” he affirmed.

Coupang’s product commerce segment, which contributes around 85 percent of total sales, recorded $7.4 billion in net revenue, a 12 percent increase on a constant currency basis. The company noted that this growth rate was a few percentage points lower than the 18 percent constant-currency growth reported in the third quarter, primarily due to a slowdown in December, which “appears related to the data incident.”

The number of active customers in the product commerce segment reached 24.6 million in the fourth quarter, an 8 percent increase year-over-year, but a slight decrease from 24.7 million in the previous quarter. The company explained that while the quarter-over-quarter decrease seemed linked to the data breach, customer metrics have stabilized since late in the fourth quarter, with many users reactivating their accounts and overall growth trends improving.

Harold Rogers, Coupang Korea’s interim CEO, reiterated that the compromised data has been deleted and emphasized that there is no evidence of any harm resulting from the illegally accessed information.

“Importantly, there is no evidence that any of that data was ever viewed by anyone else. This is also supported by the fact that there have been zero confirmed instances of any of this customer data being exploited,” he stated during the earnings call.

“We have retained multiple outside experts to monitor, among other places, the dark web and deep web, including CNSecurity. To date, there has been no detection of misuse of customer data attributable to the incident, nor is there evidence that any Coupang user data related to the incident exists on those sources.”

hwkan