Coupang is South Korea’s largest e-commerce platform. The company went public last month on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), in the biggest initial public offering (IPO) to date this year. The company is often dubbed “the Amazon of South Korea,” but the comparison is overstated. The US online behemoth turned its first yearly profit nine years after its founding. Coupang, ten years after its launch, has yet to turn a profit. Over the past decade, the South Korean equivalent to Amazon has amassed about $4.2 billion in losses.

It is almost a norm for early-stage start-ups to focus on revenue and investment growth at the expense of earnings. However, less than two years ago, Coupang — which raised $84.5 billion in its IPO — was on the edge of a crisis. It was quickly burning through the $2.7 billion received from its Japanese backer, SoftBank — as the company attempted to outcompete other e-retailers and even encroach on big-box retailers’ perishable aisles, with a series of aggressive moves such as early-morning and late-night deliveries, in tune with the daily life of the country with the longest working hours in the wealthy world.

With this expansion, Coupang could not recast South Korea’s highly competitive retail industry to its advantage in ways Amazon did in the United States nor break open a clear path to profitability or an IPO — up until 2019, Coupang’s operating loss almost irreversibly engulfed revenue, thus overburdening Softbank, which had been burned by the $9 billion WeWork debacle.