Talks Underway for 2 Tril. Won Investment
Masayoshi Son, chairman of Japan's SoftBank Group, has picked Yanolja as a Korean venture company that can become the next Coupang. Son is expected to invest two trillion won to grow Yanolja into a global accommodation and travel platform and directly list it in the U.S. stock market.
Son’s Vision Fund, the world's largest venture capital, is in the final stage of negotiations with Yanolja for investment. When the deal is completed, Vision Fund will secure a 25-30 percent stake in Yanolja. The fund is planning to invest one trillion won each in the company’s old and new shares.
It will be the second-largest investment in a Korean venture company after an investment of about 3.35 trillion won in Coupang in Korea. Market experts expected Vision Fund to invest about one trillion won, but the fund has decided to double its investment.
Yanolja plans to have an IPO in the U.S. stock market in 2023 at the earliest. The company officially disclosed its IPO plan in October 2020 and has been studying domestic and overseas stock markets. If Vision Fund invests in it, the company will be listed in the U.S. stock market. When it is listed in the Korean stock market, its corporate value is estimated at three trillion won to four trillion won. Yet if it is listed in the U.S. stock market, its value could reach more than won 10 trillion won. The market capitalization of Airbnb, an accommodation sharing platform with sales 10 times those of Yanolja, amounts to about won 100 trillion won.
Yanolja plans to grow into one of the world's leading accommodation and travel platforms like Airbnb and Hotels Dot Com. The company will be able to diversify its business through additional mergers and acquisitions (M&A) with the investment from Vision Fund. Yanolja has expanded its business from B2C to B2B. Since 2019, it has steadily invested in AI- and IoT-based property management system (PMS) technology. It acquired top-ranked domestic and foreign PMS companies.
To strike a deal with Vision Fund, Yanolja needs to obtain endorsement from all existing shareholders, which include the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), Booking Holdings, Partners Investment, Murex Partners, Aju IB Investment, SBI Investment, SL Investment, and Skylake Investment. When Yanolja received the last investment from the GIC in 2019, its corporate value stood at about won 1 trillion. The current investors are likely to agree to Yanolja’s sale of its shares as it is an opportunity to make substantial profits.