Emart, South Korea's dominant offline retailer, is to begin offering rapid-delivery services through Coupang Eats, the food-and-grocery delivery platform operated by Coupang — its most formidable rival. The partnership between two companies that have long fought over the same consumers has been greeted with undisguised astonishment across the industry. "Sleeping with the enemy" is the phrase on many lips.
Why now, and why Coupang Eats?
The immediate context is the explosive growth of quick commerce — the business of delivering goods within thirty minutes. According to data from Statistics Korea and the Korea Online Shopping Association, the domestic quick-commerce market more than tripled between 2022 and 2025, rising from roughly 1 trillion won to an estimated 3 trillion won (approximately $730m). The driving force is a generational shift in expectations: younger South Korean consumers, accustomed to near-instant delivery, are losing patience with the overnight and early-morning delivery slots that large supermarkets have traditionally offered.
Emart has its own e-commerce arm, SSG.com, and a same-day delivery service known as "SSG Delivery." But building a fine-grained urban delivery network from scratch is expensive and slow. Coupang Eats already possesses a nationwide fleet of riders and a real-time demand-matching algorithm honed over years of food delivery. For Emart, partnering with Coupang Eats offers a way to acquire rapid-delivery capability quickly, without the capital outlay of constructing its own infrastructure.
Platform dependency versus pragmatic survival
Industry opinion is divided. Sceptics warn that the deal could prove self-defeating. When transactions flow through a rival's platform, data on product preferences, purchasing patterns and pricing inevitably enriches that rival's ecosystem. "Once you become dependent on a platform, your leverage in fee negotiations weakens and the customer relationship gradually migrates to the platform rather than to you," said one senior retail-industry executive.
Proponents of the deal point to the alternative risks of going it alone. Walmart's experience is instructive: by attempting to bypass Amazon's marketplace while simultaneously sustaining an expensive proprietary delivery network, the American retailer saw its profitability suffer. Japan's Aeon offers a contrasting lesson: by distributing across multiple external platforms, including Rakuten and DoorDash, it managed to defend its market share without over-committing to any single channel. The Korea Distribution Industry Research Institute strikes a measured note: "Collaboration with a competing platform can clearly deliver short-term revenue gains, but without a parallel effort to build proprietary data capabilities, the long-term risks are considerable."
A deal shaped by structural pressure
The partnership cannot be separated from Emart's financial difficulties. The company recorded consecutive declines in operating profit in 2023 and 2024, and has been restructuring its physical store portfolio while pushing harder into online channels. With Coupang's Rocket Delivery and Rocket Fresh services extending their grip into fresh food — traditionally Emart's stronghold — the retailer appears to have concluded that outright confrontation with Coupang is less viable than seeking a modus vivendi.
Similar accommodations are already commonplace elsewhere in Korean retail. GS Retail lists products from its GS25 convenience-store chain across multiple delivery platforms, including Coupang Eats and Baemin (South Korea's leading food-delivery app), to diversify its quick-commerce reach. CU, another major convenience chain, has deepened its delivery-app ties to the point where quick-commerce now reportedly accounts for more than 10% of its total sales. By this measure, Emart is a latecomer — catching up with a trend that convenience stores and supermarkets embraced some time ago.
What Coupang Eats stands to gain
The deal is no act of charity on Coupang's part. By adding Emart's brand — and its fresh food and household-goods ranges — to its platform, Coupang Eats can strengthen its product offering in the categories where it faces the most competition. More strategically, it can use the partnership to reposition itself: from a restaurant-delivery app to a broader platform for instant delivery of everyday needs. This matters because Coupang Eats remains the number-two player in South Korean food delivery, with around 7m monthly active users at the end of 2024, well behind Baemin. Securing Emart as an anchor partner could meaningfully boost platform traffic and help close that gap.
The questions that will determine the outcome
Retail analysts identify two variables as decisive: data sovereignty and the fee structure. How Emart integrates sales data and customer information into its own customer-relationship management systems — rather than allowing that intelligence to flow unchecked to Coupang — will determine whether the partnership strengthens or hollows out its competitive position. Equally important is whether the commission rates Emart pays to Coupang Eats are locked in at levels that allow the economics to work over the long term.
Over the medium term, the critical test will be whether Emart can pursue a genuine dual-track strategy: using Coupang Eats as one channel among several while simultaneously building its own quick-commerce capabilities. The cautionary precedent is well known. Many brands that listed on Amazon found themselves progressively captured by the platform — sacrificing negotiating power and customer ownership in exchange for short-term sales volumes. The same trap awaits any retailer that allows the pursuit of immediate revenue to crowd out investment in independent infrastructure.
South Korea's retail market is being reorganised around a new competitive logic, one in which today's adversary is tomorrow's distribution partner. Whether the Emart–Coupang Eats arrangement proves to be a tactical convenience or a harbinger of deeper structural change in Korean retail will depend on how skilfully both companies manage the inherent tensions in a partnership between rivals.