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The Korean company will be investing on more hires and warehouses over the next two years

Korean e-commerce firm Coupang announced yesterday that it will be spending KRW1.5 trillion (about US$1.3 billion) on improving its delivery and logistics services.

This amount will be invested over the next two years, reported The Korea Times.

At a press conference, Kim Bom, CEO, Coupang, said that the firm will increase the number of delivery staffers to 40,000 and run 21 warehouses across South Korea by the end of 2017.

At the moment, the five-year-old company has 3,500 workers running its delivery services, and another 6,000 tending to its logistics and customer service centres. It has also built 14 warehouses.

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Its in-house delivery system, Rocket Delivery, was launched in March 2014. The company was accused of violating the country’s Transport Service Act for running its own delivery operations, which competes with independent logistics providers, but the charges have been dropped.

The Korea Herald also reported that the firm “more than doubled” its mobile payment transactions for 2014 to hit KRW1.4 trillion (about US$1.2 billion) after launching Rocket Delivery.

Kim said, “We hire mostly people in their 20s and 30s, who are desperately seeking a job, as delivery personnel. We have been creating as many decent jobs as Hyundai and other large companies have for young jobseekers.”

He is confident that, going forward, Coupang will be able to leverage on its logistics system to provide same-day delivery within South Korea.

Coupang most recently raised US$1 billion from long-time investor Japanese telecommunications firm SoftBank at a valuation of US$5 billion.

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