South Korea's Kakao acquires social e-commerce Grip to expand into the live streaming sales field!

According to industry insiders, in order to strengthen the company's online shopping business, South Korea's Kakao purchased approximately 50% of the shares of live streaming e-commerce platform Grip for approximately 180 billion won.

Kakao Talk is one of the most popular chat software in South Korea, but its online shopping business has always been its weakest link. Kakao Group will recently cooperate with Grip to not only strengthen its e-commerce business, but also expand the field of live streaming with the help of Grip's advantages.

Kakao said in a statement that it will create a live-streaming e-commerce ecosystem that anyone can use to help small merchants expand their customer base at home and abroad, and combine live-streaming capabilities with its existing Messenger products.

Grip was founded in 2018 and launched South Korea's first e-commerce live streaming platform in 2019, with more than 10,000 registered users selling products to viewers through live streaming. As of the end of November, the total transaction volume of the Grip application was about 100 billion won.

Grip has cooperated with many shopping malls, such as Shinsegae Duty Free Shop, AK Department Store and GS25 Convenience Store. More than 200 live broadcasts are held on Grip every day, which has accumulated a lot of users and also attracted many consumers to the platform and became new registered users.

The platform provides various functions to promote interaction and communication between sellers and audiences. Grip provides real-time business tools for enterprises, allowing them to use this function in their own applications or websites.

Grip has recently entered the Japanese market through cooperation with Japanese e-commerce platform Q10Japan , and plans to enter the US market in the first half of next year.

South Korea's live streaming services have made great progress in recent years. Last year, NAVER, South Korea's largest search engine , also launched a live streaming service, allowing merchants registered on the website's shopping platform to use this live streaming function. As of July this year , the total transaction volume through the live streaming business was about 250 billion won, and the total number of views was 350 million times.

In addition, South Korea's e-commerce market has developed rapidly in recent years and has become the world's fifth largest e-commerce market. It is also one of the countries with the highest online shopping penetration rate in the world.

According to relevant data, the most popular Chinese products among Korean consumers are clothing, shoes and hats, accounting for 33%; followed by home appliances and electronic products, accounting for 28%; and third is daily necessities and stationery, accounting for 12%.

Kyobo Securities expects South Korea's live streaming market to be worth about 2.8 trillion won in 2021 and to grow to 10 trillion won by 2023.

As competition in South Korea's domestic e-commerce market is also fierce, Chinese sellers can seize opportunities, leverage their own advantages, strictly control product quality, and at the same time improve logistics speed to provide consumers with a full range of high-quality services.

live streaming

South Korea