Socar Reports Operating Loss of 10.8 Billion KRW in Q1... "Will Achieve Performance Improvement in Second Half"

Socar announced on the 13th that it recorded an operating loss of 10.8 billion KRW for the first quarter of this year on a consolidated basis. Although first-quarter sales increased by 5.7% to 90.6 billion KRW, the net loss widened to 16.7 billion KRW.

Revenue from the car-sharing segment rose 24.1% year-on-year to 83.8 billion KRW. The platform business segment recorded transaction volume of 18.4 billion KRW, up 62.9% compared to a year ago.

Sales from used car sales in the first quarter were 200 million KRW, down 98% from the same period last year. This is interpreted as the result of minimizing used car sales to expand vehicle LTV (lifetime value).

Socar expects to maintain a high sales growth rate starting from the second quarter through expanding demand via external channel sales of car-sharing, expanding platform services such as airport transfer services and foreigner mobility services, and continuous improvement of vehicle economics, and anticipates meaningful profitability improvement from the third quarter.

From the end of May, car-sharing services will be available for reservation on Naver. Socar expects to discover a large number of new car-sharing demands by expanding external channel sales starting with Naver.

The mobility membership Passport plans to significantly increase actual subscribers by the end of the year by diversifying products and increasing benefits. In the first quarter, a new multi-pass product was launched that adds benefits such as accommodation discounts and free call services to the existing car-sharing usage fee discounts. The cumulative usage frequency per Passport subscriber was 3.7 times higher than that of non-subscribers after 15 months.

Jaeuk Park, CEO of Socar, said, "We will focus investments to implement the Socar 2.0 strategy until the second quarter and achieve full-scale performance improvement in the second half of the year," adding, "We will strive to establish high growth and a stable profit structure."