Coupang, an e-commerce platform that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), has been stirring public outrage over the past few months in South Korea, home to most of its colossal operations, amid revelations of massive data breaches and unsafe workplace practices.
What is happening to the South Korean multinational should reverberate beyond the country’s borders. The ways in which it has been shirking accountability and regulatory oversight, and resisting unionization efforts, speaks volumes about the future trajectory of global e-commerce platforms and their workers.
Coupang is South Korea’s answer to Amazon and Uber Eats combined. Its labor malpractices were already clear back in 2021, when the company went public on the NYSE. The past two months have validated the concerns expressed at the time.
In December, Coupang disclosed a massive data breach that exposed almost thirty-four million customer accounts. The national ID numbers and financial details of about three-quarters of South Korea’s population above the age of twenty are likely to have been compromised.
Public anger has brought the platform’s mistreatment of its workforce into focus. In 2025 alone, eight Coupang workers died of overwork-related conditions such as cerebral hemorrhages, with six of them working on a nighttime or predawn shift.
Bom Kim, a Korean American Harvard Business School dropout, launched the Coupang site for trading discount coupons in 2010. Over the next few years, it became a full-fledged e-commerce platform with more than one hundred fulfillment centers.
From ruthless pricing strategies to the aggressive elimination of competition, Coupang has emulated the early expansionary phase of Amazon. Coupang now controls about a quarter of South Korea’s e-commerce marketplace, which has become the world’s fifth-largest after expanding tenfold over the last decade.
Coupang now controls about a quarter of South Korea’s e-commerce marketplace, which has become the…
Auteur: Kap Seol
