Hotel cleaner becomes Korea’s newest self-made billionaire
In the context of the world reopening and industries from tourism to hotels all recovering strongly after the Covid-19 pandemic, Korean super app Yanolja also posted strong growth in first-quarter sales.
According to Forbes, this company is preparing to list on the stock exchange in the near future. Yanolja’s report published last week also revealed the number of shares held by founder Lee Su-jin.
Billionaire Lee (44 years old) is currently the CEO and second largest shareholder of Yanolja, holding 16.54% of the company’s shares. His wife and two daughters each own 5.18% of the shares. Yanolja’s largest shareholder is SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. The fund bought a 25.23% stake in Yanolja last July for $1.7 billion. At that time, Yanolja was valued at $6.7 billion. Forbes estimates Lee and his family’s net worth at $2 billion.
Founded in 2005, Yanolja – which means “Let’s play” in Korean, has expanded its business model from short-stay hotels to transportation and most recently to cloud computing software. helps hotels and travel agencies digitize business processes.
The company said first-quarter revenue this year jumped 19% year-on-year to 100.5 billion won ($80 million), while net profit fell slightly from 9 billion won to 8.8 billion won. won.
Lee Su-jin is Korea’s newest self-made billionaire (Photo: Internet).
The majority of Yanolja’s revenue comes from charging hotels and travel agencies to advertise on its platform. In recent years, the company has expanded its cloud-based business, such as systems that help hotels manage reservations and big data analytics that predict customer behavior. Revenue from this activity contributed 20.5% to Yanolja’s total revenue in the first quarter of 2022, up from 8.5% last year.
Also in the report, Yanolja said that more and more hotels in South Korea are using software to reduce costs and increase efficiency during and after the pandemic.
Last April, Korean media reported that Yanolja plans to list on Nasdaq in the third quarter of this year. In addition to SoftBank, Yanolja’s other investors include Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, online travel agency Booking.com and SkyLake Investment, a Korean private equity firm led by former Samsung Electronics CEO.
Like Kakao founder Kim Beom-su – who topped the list of Korea’s richest billionaires in 2022 by Forbes Korea, Lee is an example of a story of overcoming poverty to achieve success.
Orphaned at a young age, Lee worked as a babysitter in hotels before founding Yanolja. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Kongju National University. According to Bloomberg, Lee leveraged relationships with toilet paper suppliers and hoteliers to establish and grow Yanolja.
Lee is the latest entrepreneur to join a growing group of self-made billionaires in South Korea, where a number of family conglomerates (chaebols) dominate the economy. Another notable character is Lee Seung-gun. Against his parents’ disapproval, he ran away from home and founded fintech startup Viva Republica. Last year, Lee’s company raised $410 million in a funding round and was valued at $7.4 billion. Thanks to that, he became a self-made billionaire.
Source: Forbes
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