KT makes partial exit from travel platform Yanolja

South Korea’s telecom giant KT Corp. has made a partial exit from the country’s largest travel platform Yanolja, which is eyeing a US IPO by 2023.

According to the investment banking industry on Aug. 24, KT has sold a total of 19,500 preference shares, 25% of 78,230 shares it held. KT became the lifestyle and travel startup’s shareholder in 2019 by investing 20 billion won ($17 million) in Series D funding.

Analysts say that KT’s rate of return for the shares is estimated at around 700%. Although the selling price was not disclosed, the analysts highlighted that Yanolja received a valuation of 8 trillion won ($6.9 billion) when it raised 2 trillion won ($1.7 billion) from the SoftBank Group last month. Yanolja’s valuation at the time of KT’s Series D investment was only 1 trillion won ($857 million).  

Granting that KT sold the 19,500 shares at the price that SoftBank paid last month, KT has made a profit of about 35 billion won ($30 million). The profit that KT can additionally generate from the unsold shares at the current valuation is 105 billion won ($90 million).

KT is likely to sell the rest of the shares during or immediately after Yanolja’s Nasdaq IPO planned for 2023. Investment banking analysts projected that Yanolja’s valuation will reach $10 billion by the time of its listing.

Established in 2005, Yanolja is a platform that primarily provides booking services for a wide range of accommodations from hotels, resorts to pensions. The company has lately expanded its services to leisure, food and shopping segments and also provides hospitality solutions to corporate clients around the world.

Yanolja made an operating profit of 1.5 billion won ($1.28 million) last year, the first profit in six years, on revenue of 288.8 billion won ($247.3 million), up by 16.7% from 2019.

Meanwhile, KT has been making a series of investments in rising startups in recent years. Other early-stage deals made by KT include the 12 billion won ($10.3 million) investment in SmartStudy, the creator of Baby Shark, and 25 billion won ($21.4 million) investment in the fintech company Banksalad Co.

Write to Jin-seong Kim at jskim1028@hankyung.com
Daniel Cho edited this article.