This year, Coupang reached the top of the social commerce game with two major investments. In order to chase Coupang 'WEMAKEPRICE' announced their buyout of Ticket Monster (TMON).
There was reserved bidding session for TMON until the morning of 31st. 10 fund manager companies including Carlyle, Affinity, KKR, Anchor Partners, and WEMAKEPRICE participated in this session.
TMON came out on 2010 as the very first domestic social commerce platform. It was purchased by Groupon for 275 billion won(250M $) last January and came back out on the market after a year.
Currently Coupang is holding 12.35 million users. Since WEMAKEPRICE is holding 12.34 million users and TMON is holding 9.7 million users, merging two together would make WEMAKEPRICE number one in the social commerce market in Korea. This is WEMAKEPRICE's official announcement regarding to this merger.
Hi, this is social commerce WEMAP (WEMAKEPRICE).
I would like to speak for our official announcement about our interest towards TMON.
As most of you know, We have already told that it is our goal to reach the top on 2015. Since our competition between global shopping channels like Amazon and Ali Baba is near, we felt the necessity to be the leader of Korean Web Commerce and contribute to Korean economy by being the top in this global competition.
This TMON merger interest submission was done under top secrecy. We have been open to every possibilities for our 2015 goal and this proposal is found to have very effective synergy. Also because the promise for privacy has been made regarding to this matter, the meetings were arranged between only us and the CEO himself.
Only 'fact' we can share at this moment is that we are 'inclined' to merge with TMON and will be putting much more serious thoughts into this. Nothing concrete has been planned yet.
Us, WEMAP, consider our motto 'We save our customers time and money' as the most valuable management philosophy. On this 2015, WEMAP will prepare for the global competition as the Korean online commerce leader and will consistently contribute to Korean economy with actions instead of words.
