Yanolja to restructure affiliates to boost profit before Nasdaq IPO

South Korea’s top travel and accommodation booking platform operator Yanolja Co. is seeking to streamline and restructure its affiliates to boost profitability ahead of its planned initial public offering on the Nasdaq this year.

Industry sources said on Tuesday the platform operator plans to absorb and integrate the Daily Hotel app and website into Yanolja by Nov. 5.

As part of the plan, Daily Hotel, a hotel and restaurant reservation app, will stop new membership registrations and product sales on Sept. 10.

Yanolja acquired Daily Hotel in 2019.

The move to integrate overlapping businesses comes as Yanolja’s profitability has worsened, making it increasingly difficult to achieve its initially targeted enterprise value of 10 trillion won ($7.3 billion) for a Nasdaq IPO, industry officials said.

AGGRESSIVE M&As

Founded in 2005, Yanolja has actively pursued mergers and acquisitions to grow beyond its core travel platform business.

It acquired Daily Hotel and eZee Technosys in 2019 and Dable in 2021.

In 2022, Yanolja spent about 300 billion won to acquire Interpark Inc., one of Korea’s first-generation e-commerce platforms, and Triple, a hyper-personalized travel platform.

Later, it sold off Interpark’s shopping and book businesses and changed the travel platform’s name to Interpark Triple.

Last year, it acquired Go Global Travel (GGT), an Israel-based company for global B2B travel solutions, through its subsidiary Yanolja Cloud.

CLOUD BUSINESS

While pursuing corporate restructuring, Yanolja plans to strengthen its cloud business, which it has designated as one of its future growth drivers.

Currently, it operates a business-to-business (B2B) cloud service by providing domestic and foreign hotels with reservation and management solutions.

Yanolja is expected to list its shares on the Nasdaq by the end of this year, but its corporate value could be lower than anticipated given its weak earnings.

Yanolja was valued at 8 trillion won when the Vision Fund, led by billionaire SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, invested $1.7 billion in the Korean company to own a 24.9% stake in 2021.

Last year, Yanolja eked out a mere 1.7 billion won in operating profit on sales of 766.7 billion won.

More recently, Yanolja has had trouble receiving 170 billion won in stake sale proceeds from Singapore-based Qoo10 Pte., which is struggling due to liquidity problems at its Korean e-commerce units TMON Inc. and WeMakePrice Co.

Write to Sun A Lee at suna@hankyung.com

In-Soo Nam edited this article.