Socar Celebrates 1 Year Listed: "Striving to Improve Performance... Will Reward Shareholders' Support"

Socar, celebrating its first anniversary since listing, has taken steps to appease its shareholders. Through a shareholder letter, the company reflected on the stock price, which has halved compared to the initial public offering price, and revealed its future business plans.

On the 25th, Socar CEO Park Jae-wook stated in the shareholder letter, "Socar has actively communicated its strategies and plans to become a mobility platform to the market, and all employees have been doing their best to improve performance. However, we have not yet met the market’s expectations. We deeply reflect on this and will do our utmost to repay the support of our shareholders who continue to cheer us on."

CEO Park also announced plans to strengthen responsible management. He explained, "According to the contract, the largest shareholder acquired half of the shares held by IMM PE, and some of these were sold to Lotte Rental. As a result, the largest shareholder’s holdings have increased, and the shares held by major shareholder Lotte Rental have also partially increased, which is expected to further enhance management stability."

He added, "The largest shareholder has decided to donate approximately 140,000 shares, part of the increased stake, free of charge to Socar and its subsidiaries’ employees. Empowered by the trust shown by the largest and major shareholders in the management team, we will dedicate the company’s full capabilities to grow into a car-sharing based mobility platform."

Socar plans to focus its future investments on service development for product enhancement and marketing.

CEO Park explained the achievements over the past year, saying, "In the first half of this year, marking one year since listing, sales grew by 18.1% compared to the same period last year, and the average monthly revenue per vehicle increased by 20.1%, from 1.44 million KRW in the first half of last year to 1.73 million KRW this year."

He continued, "The transaction volume of Socar’s platform services accounts for about 17% of car-sharing service sales. At the time of listing, the mobility platform transaction volume was only 10%, but we expanded it to 17% within a year, and we plan to raise it to around 30% next year."

CEO Park emphasized, "By the end of the year, we will focus investments on service development to enhance the product quality of Socar Stay and marketing to secure demand, so that Socar users can enjoy more convenient and diverse services. Socar is the only player providing comfortable and safe mobility services for all customers needing transportation, from 30 minutes to 3 years, and based on this competitiveness, we believe we can achieve further growth."

Recently, Socar signed a business agreement with Naver. By combining its own data with Naver’s new hyper-large AI HyperCLOVA X, Socar plans to build an AI customer response system and enhance recommendation and reservation functions.

Regarding this, CEO Park said, "Through this, the number of uses is expected to increase by more than 20% over the next two years. Following Naver, we plan to open APIs to various platform companies to expand partnerships, enabling users of those platforms to use Socar’s services more conveniently."

Finally, he stated, "The projects planned by the company are beginning to show results one by one, and we will prove this through performance to create a more valuable company."

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