stands at $1.25 billion.  “Momentum continued to build across the business in Q3,” founder and chief executive Bom Kim told analysts on the earnings call. The question hanging over the results is how long it will take that momentum to show up in profit. Three blows in under a year Most of this year’s losses can be traced to three events. In late November 2025, the company disclosed that personal information linked to 33.7 million customer accounts had been exposed, the largest data leak in South Korea’s history. Some members of Coupang’s paid membership, Wow, cancelled. The number of active customers in its core retail business, meaning people who bought at least once in a quarter, fell from 24.6 million at the end of 2025 to 23.9 million in the first quarter of this year.  In June, the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) fined Coupang a record 624.7 billion won (about US$409 million), more than three times its previous record penalty, imposed on SK Telecom in 2025. That fine pushed the second quarter to the largest quarterly operating loss since Coupang listed in 2021. Then, on July 18, a fire broke out on the sixth floor of Coupang’s No. 32 fulfilment centre in Incheon, an eight-storey building with about 299,000 square metres of floor space. All 121 people inside got out unhurt, but the blaze burned for more than 109 hours before it was fully extinguished.  The fire’s bill landed in this quarter: US$248 million in expenses, booked as US$95 million in cost of sales and US$153 million in operating costs. Excluding it, Coupang’s operating loss narrows to US$202 million and its net loss to US$321 million. Coupang carries property and business-interruption insurance expected to cover a large share of the damage.  The customers came back Put the fire and the fine to one side, and the core business looks healthier than its profit line. Product Commerce, Coupang’s main Korean retail operation built around its Rocket same-day and overnight delivery, grew revenue 8 per cent in constant currency to US$8.4 billion. The company said the earlier timing of the Chuseok harvest holiday this year shaved about a percentage point off growth; adjusted for that, Product Commerce grew roughly 9 per cent, faster than in the second quarter. Active customers rose to 25.2 million, up 2 per cent from a year earlier and now above where they stood before the breach. Each spent an average of US$342 in the quarter in constant currency, up 6 per cent. Kim said Wow membership in Korea is at the highest level in its history, with net additions running above historical rates, driven by both returning members and strong new sign-ups. He was keen to describe how lapsed members behaved once they came back. “The members who did return, despite being away and allocating their retail wallets elsewhere for a period, have not only returned to their prior levels of spend but they’ve continued to compound this quarter at normalized rates,” he said. “And the members who never left are also spending at record levels and growing as fast as they were before the incident.” The weak spot, he acknowledged, is the small cohort of members who left after the data incident and haven’t yet returned. New sign-ups have more than filled the gap in member numbers, but new customers start out spending less.  “It takes time for them to climb it, as each cohort before them has,” Kim said.  As Coupang laps the breach period next year, he argued, those lost customers drop out of the comparison and reported growth should line up with the stronger underlying trend. Groceries are doing much of the heavy lifting. Rocket Fresh volumes grew at more than twice the pace of Product Commerce overall.  “Fresh is a category customers buy with high frequency, and the delivery experience we provide is deeply differentiated,” Kim said. “It engages customers with Coupang in a way few other categories can, and we see a long runway here.” Coupang is also adding perks to keep members loyal. This quarter, it began rolling out Try Now, Pay Later, which lets Wow members try on fashion items for seven days before paying.  “Our goal is to make Wow the best value membership program anywhere in retail,” Kim said. Taiwan: The expensive bet Taiwan is driving both the growth and the spending.  Wow membership there more than doubled from a year earlier and rose 14 per cent from the previous quarter. Dawn Delivery, launched on the island only last quarter, now reaches more than half the population.  “This is remarkably similar behavior to what we saw in Korea at the same stage,” Kim said. To keep pace, Coupang is building warehouses and supply chains ahead of demand. It raised the top end of its full-year Developing Offerings loss forecast by $50 million to $100 million, lifting the upper end of the range from US$1 billion to as much as US$1.1 billion.  “When we’re at this early stage and we’re growing as fast as we are, a lot of the infrastructure investments that are required for the level of service that we’re trying to provide, they do involve a lot of lead time,” Kim said. “So we do build ahead of demand.”  Chief financial officer, Gaurav Anand, described it as an opportunity “to pull forward some of our investments to expand the gap in our customer value proposition”.  He added the on-demand food delivery service Coupang Eats in Korea and Japan continue to run at about break-even. Kim still expects Taiwan to become “a meaningful contributor to consolidated cash flow in the years to come”, but Coupang has not said when losses there will peak. It will give guidance for 2027 with its fourth-quarter results. Back in Korea, Coupang is testing non-food delivery through Eats, working with convenience stores and local merchants to bring everyday items to customers in minutes. Kim played down expectations. “We start small, we test, we look for clear validation,” he said. What to watch Coupang’s shares have lost about half their value over the past year and trade near their 52-week low of $13.35, against a high of $32.14.  “The underlying customer base in Korea continued to grow,” Kim said, calling the behaviour of those shoppers “the clearest indication” of how durable that growth is.  Kim has told investors he expects Product Commerce margins to recover by the middle of 2027. If he is right, the turnaround should show up in the second-quarter numbers next year. If it does not, the gap between how much South Koreans like shopping on Coupang and how much money Coupang makes from them will become the story. Further reading: How Coupang is spending its way through a crisis of its own making.