Why hiring foreign workers is tough in Korea, but easier for Coupang

Delivery trucks operate at a Coupang logistics center in Seoul, Monday. Yonhap

Coupang, reeling from a sweeping data breach allegedly linked to a former Chinese employee, is drawing fire over its heavy reliance on foreign workers in its IT department.

While visa rules remain one of the biggest barriers for Korean companies seeking to hire foreign workers, Coupang faces far fewer restrictions because it is classified as a foreign-invested company with its headquarters in the U.S.

The company, widely seen as Korea’s answer to Amazon, is said to have about 1,000 foreign employees in Korea, accounting for roughly 10 percent of its workforce.

As a foreign-invested company, the e-commerce giant can navigate visa requirements more easily than domestic firms, giving it access to a broader pool of eligible workers.

Korean companies generally rely on the E-7 visa when hiring foreign workers. The E-7 is a work visa granted to foreign nationals with verified professional expertise or specialized technical skills and is divided into 87 job categories, including IT, business management, finance and design. The requirements for this visa are stringent, covering factors such as academic background, work experience, language proficiency and minimum income levels.

Foreign-invested companies like Coupang, however, can hire not only through the E-7 visa but also through the D-7 and D-8 visa categories. The D-7 visa is issued when a foreign headquarters dispatches staff to its Korean branch or when a company brings back foreign employees who previously worked at its overseas offices. The D-8 visa is granted to professional managers and executives of foreign-invested companies.

Global firms such as Google, AliExpress and major IT, logistics and imported car companies operate under similar visa structures.

Although applicants for D-7 or D-8 visas must still meet eligibility requirements, the standards are generally less stringent than those for the E-7. The initial one-year stay guaranteed under these visas, the screening process for extensions and the procedures for obtaining an F-3 dependent visa are all considered easier than under the E-7.

This enables the company to hire across a broader range of visa categories, resulting in a significantly higher share of foreign workers in its technical roles.

However, this has fueled concerns that the company’s high proportion of foreign employees is not matched by adequate internal controls.

As police probe the large-scale data breach at Coupang, investigators have pinpointed a former Chinese developer as the main suspect. Although the employee had been with the company for only two years, he was reportedly given access to critical security systems.

It is highly unusual in today’s security-conscious corporate environment for a newly hired developer of foreign nationality to be entrusted with sensitive security tasks that could grant access to customer data, according to industry insiders.

Concerns are mounting as some observers have pointed out that many of Coupang’s foreign employees do not need Korean work visas to begin with.

With the company’s flexible remote-work structure and the nature of IT roles, many positions can be handled from overseas — a vulnerability that, if not tightly controlled, could dramatically widen the impact of any security breach.

Currently, Coupang operates offices in China, the United States, India, Singapore and other countries, and its overseas workforce alone is estimated to number more than 3,000.