Lotte chief urges breakthrough in e-commerce

Lotte Group Chairman Shin Dong-bin participates in an online presidential meeting held at company headquarters in Seoul on Jan. 13. Yonhap

Lotte seeks to maintain competitive edge with ESG

By Kim Jae-heun

Lotte Group Chairman Shin Dong-bin moved up a presidential board meeting two week earlier to Thursday to come up with countermeasures for competing against Coupang, Naver and Shinsegae ― the new “big three” in the local e-commerce market.

The half-yearly meeting was originally scheduled for the third week of this month, but it is understood that Shin felt there was no time to wait after its long-time rival Shinsegae acquired eBay Korea last month thus making it the second-largest e-commerce firm.

It is unknown what Shin has requested of Lotte Shopping CEO Kang Hee-tae, who joined the meeting along with four other CEOs representing Lotte Holdings, Lotte Foods, Lotte Chemical and Hotel Lotte.

The most urgent item on its agenda at the meeting was keeping the momentum of its e-commerce business alive, as its online shopping unit's market share lags 10 percent behind the top three's average.

“Businesses in chemical, retail and food are the areas to be discussed at the Value Creation Meeting (CEOs' meeting). For retail, strategies on e-commerce will be talked about mainly,” a Lotte Group official said. Earlier, Shin urged the representatives to “forget about the successes the company achieved in the past and make changes for themselves first.”

On the same day, GS Retail made a new start as one retail company integrating all of its subsidiaries and launched a new “quick commerce” service that will deliver orders in less than two hours. SK Telecom's e-commerce firm 11st is preparing to launch a collaboration service with Amazon, the world's largest online retailer.

Feeling a sense of crisis, Lotte Shopping specified its plans to actively utilize big data to predict the trend and offer products to customers according to their online search history.

This could be seen as Lotte aiming to make a breakthrough on its own. Lotte Shopping CEO Kang said the company will take the chance when it can acquire or establish strategic alliances with other online retailers, but that no concrete decisions have been made yet.

Meanwhile, Lotte Holdings declared that the group will beef up its environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) management starting from the second half of this year.

The group revealed its new slogan “New Today, Better Tomorrow” and said the company will run large-scale campaigns internally and externally to contribute to the global society.

Lotte aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2040 and evaluate CEOs in each business unit based on their ESG management. The retailer will also establish an ESG committee under each listed affiliate to show its strong willingness to improve its group's reputation as eco-friendly and ethical.