Fresh-food specialist platform Kurly teamed up with Naver last month. It joined the Naver Plus Store under the name "Kurly N Mart." Since its founding, Kurly had stuck to an in-house app–centric strategy, and this is the first time it has entered an external platform under its own brand. It is seen not as a simple channel expansion but as a strategic move to overhaul its survival structure by maximizing logistics efficiency.
According to the retail industry on the 13th, Kurly has made large-scale investments in logistics infrastructure in recent years. It built large logistics centers with automation facilities at key hubs in the Seoul metropolitan area, including Pyeongtaek (about 72.5 billion won) and Gimpo (about 30 billion won). It also completed a cold chain system that integrates the entire refrigerated and frozen process. While this infrastructure enables quality control and fast delivery, the structure also requires securing a certain volume of freight to ensure stable profitability. It was time for more orders and logistics turnover to efficiently run the infrastructure already in place.
Kim Seul-a, Kurly's CEO, said at a recent Naver Commerce Meetup, "We need to maximize logistics efficiency by making full use of the infrastructure already invested," adding, "Our goal is to secure enough volume to keep the centers running at full capacity." The explanation was that if Naver's 40 million users and hundreds of thousands of sellers use Kurly's logistics network, utilization will rise and per-unit logistics costs will fall, creating a virtuous cycle.
In the first half of this year, Kurly posted 1.1595 trillion won in sales and 3.1 billion won in operating profit, turning a profit for the first time since its founding. In particular, third-party logistics (3PL) transaction value rose by nearly 60% from a year earlier, lifting the logistics business as a new growth axis. An industry official said, "Kurly is now evolving from a fresh-food platform into a logistics network corporations."
This partnership is the result of the alignment between Kurly's practical needs and Naver's strategy. Naver secured a grocery partner to counter Coupang's "Rocket Delivery" and "Wow Membership," and Kurly gained a foundation to boost logistics efficiency through Naver's traffic. The two sides coordinated operating standards, data processing, and customer service systems over several months to create joint key performance indicators (KPI) and built a structure that links logistics, data, and membership.
Kurly revamped its product lineup for Naver entry. It increased the share of bulk products for three- to four-person households, health functional foods, and daily necessities, and incorporated curation and search-based purchasing experiences tailored to Naver users. This effectively attempts a shift from an in-house app–centric structure to platform-based multichannel distribution.
Still, some in the market say the tie-up could be "a double-edged sword." While expanding sales through Naver may improve Kurly's logistics efficiency in the short term, its loyal customer base centered on its own app could become dispersed. In addition, as product competition with other sellers on Naver becomes inevitable, brand differentiation has emerged as a challenge.
Even so, the cooperation is seen as highly meaningful for the industry. The retail sector views it as a turning point from a traffic-centered structure (such as visitor numbers) to a supply chain–centered structure. Until now, platforms such as Naver and Coupang have held market leadership based on traffic, with brands or retail corporations following in a storefront model. This time, however, a logistics-capable Kurly changed the direction of cooperation by leveraging the platform to maximize efficiency.
Kurly's nationwide dawn-delivery network and refrigerated logistics system are assets that platform corporations find hard to implement in a short period. For Naver, it is meaningful in that it secured a partner that can reliably outsource the entire fresh-food logistics operation, beyond a simple storefront relationship.
While Coupang has strengthened its competitiveness by fully integrating its logistics network within its own platform, Kurly has chosen the opposite approach: separating platform and logistics to absorb external traffic. Both models center on efficiency, but whereas Coupang pursues internal ecosystem expansion, Kurly's strategy differs in that it expands its scope externally through collaboration.
An industry official said, "Delivery efficiency and subscription benefits have emerged as the core of competition rather than price competition," adding, "Attention is on whether this cooperation can lead to improvements in both sides' revenue and operating efficiency."