T-Commerce Soars Riding the Wave of 'Contactless Shopping'

SK Stoa Q2 Sales 78.1 Billion Won
K Shopping Sales Up 35.2% Year-on-Year

SK Stoa's living specialty program S-MART.

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Chun-han] As non-face-to-face shopping has become the trend due to the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, the three major data home shopping (T-commerce) companies continue to show strong performance.

According to SK Stoa on the 13th, sales in the second quarter of this year amounted to 78.1 billion KRW, an increase of 21.5% compared to the same period last year. Operating profit recorded 7.4 billion KRW, up 5.7%. Although operating profit showed a slight decline from the third quarter of last year through the first quarter of this year, it has turned around this time. This is analyzed to be the result of increased investment in research and development (R&D), which has begun to show results since the last quarter.

SK Stoa secured efficiency through balanced growth across all ordering platforms and product programming that maximizes the strengths of recorded broadcasts. In particular, expanding the proportion of high-margin product categories such as home-related products, health foods, and beauty products, as well as increasing external partnership channels to continuously promote mobile sales growth, drove the growth.

SK Stoa is making a bold move with cloud-based SK Stoa ON (TV remote control ordering) operation and live commerce utilizing data analysis. In the second half of this year, it plans to introduce the Stoa ON 2.0 upgrade and expand mobile partnerships such as Interpark and Lotte ON. Additionally, it is pushing to complete the construction of Digital Studio 2.0 by the end of next month. In June, SK Stoa installed one of the largest LED screen media walls in Korea and introduced the industry's first real-time rendering graphic program. The media wall construction has resulted in reducing annual set production costs for programs by more than 30%.

K Shopping recorded sales of 70.1 billion KRW in the second quarter of this year, an increase of 35.2% compared to the same period last year. This is the highest quarterly sales ever recorded. K Shopping actively invests to secure competitiveness by launching Korea's first simultaneous live broadcasts on mobile and TV applications and securing channel number 12 on Olleh TV, the largest IPTV platform in Korea. KT Alpha stated, "We plan to focus on securing new growth engines by developing new business models and quickly launching them based on synergies among mobile commerce resources secured through future mergers." Shinsegae TV Shopping also maintained stable growth with sales of 63.5 billion KRW and operating profit of 5.7 billion KRW in the second quarter of this year.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.