"1.7 Billion Investment Turns into 1.5 Trillion" Lotte Homeshopping Realizes Partial Stake in Taiwan's Momo Homeshopping

[Asia Economy Reporter Yuri Kim] Lotte Home Shopping has sold part of its shares in a Taiwanese home shopping company, in which it invested in 2004, securing about 300 billion KRW in cash. Recently, due to the booming Taiwanese stock market, the stock price surged, and the value of the shares originally acquired for 1.7 billion KRW reached 1.5 trillion KRW, prompting the company to realize gains on some of the shares.

According to the Financial Supervisory Service's electronic disclosure system on the 1st, Lotte Home Shopping announced that it sold 2.1% (about 3.8 million shares) of its stake in Taiwan's MOMO Home Shopping yesterday, securing 295.2 billion KRW. The remaining stake is 7.92% (14,418,200 shares). The unrealized gains on the remaining shares are estimated at around 1.12 trillion KRW.

In 2004, when Taiwan's Fubon Financial Group, the major shareholder of MOMO Home Shopping, was recruiting initial investors ahead of the launch of MOMO Home Shopping, Lotte Home Shopping invested 1.7 billion KRW to acquire a 10% stake. MOMO Home Shopping has grown to become the number one TV home shopping company in Taiwan since 2008. In 2016, its annual sales exceeded 1 trillion KRW. The stock price, which was 200-300 TWD in 2019, recently surged to 2,000 TWD. Lotte Home Shopping sold its 2.1% stake at 1,823 TWD per share this time.

With the spread of non-face-to-face consumption trends in Taiwan due to the COVID-19 pandemic, MOMO Home Shopping recorded sales of 67.2 billion TWD (about 2.86 trillion KRW) and pre-tax operating profit of 3 billion TWD (about 127.8 billion KRW) last year. These figures represent increases of 29.7% and 30.3%, respectively, compared to the previous year.

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