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E-Mart, which acquired professional baseball team SK Wyverns, has recruited active major leaguer Choo Shin-soo. It is interpreted that Jung Yong-jin, vice chairman of Shinsegae Group, who decided to take over the baseball team for differentiated marketing, showed a willingness to win the baseball team by recruiting world-class players with a huge investment this time. In particular, E-Mart plans to actively use baseball team marketing to raise awareness of the group’s new growth engine, SSG.com, an online shopping mall. The strategy is to develop e-commerce that can compete with the leaders of the online shopping industry, Coupang and Naver, through not only linked marketing but also the production of baseball-related goods.
Shinsegae Group officially announced on the 23rd that it has signed an annual salary of 2.7 billion won with Choo Shin-soo, a major league free agent. Shinsegae said, “Of the annual salary of Shin-soo Choo, we have decided to use 1 billion won for social contribution activities. We have decided to discuss a specific social contribution plan with the club.”
Shinsegae had the right to sign a contract with Choo Shin-soo when the SK team nominated Shin-soo Cho in a special overseas nomination in 2007. It is known that Shinsegae Group promoted the recruitment of Choo Shin-soo right after the decision to take over the baseball team in January. Shinsegae said, “We listened to the voices of Incheon fans who want to recruit Choo Shin-soo,” and said, “We had a full-fledged negotiation from last week and recently signed a final signing contract.”
As Choo Shin-soo, who played an active part in the major leagues until last year and was considered the best hitter in the history of Korean baseball, wears the uniform of the E-Mart baseball team, the green light is expected to light up on the box office road of the new club, Shinsegae. Choo Shin-soo will return to Korea on the 25th and join the team immediately after completing self-isolation for two weeks. Shin-soo Choo signed a contract with the Seattle Mariners in the major leagues in 2001 and was promoted to the big leagues in 2005. After that, he went through the Cleveland Indians, Cincinnati Reds, and Texas Rangers, leaving the record for the most home runs and RBIs for Asian players.
Meanwhile, E-Mart announced on the same day that it has signed a stock sales contract to acquire 100% of SK Telecom’s stake in the Wyverns club for 100 billion won. The sale of land and buildings owned by SK Telecom is expected to proceed as a separate contract in the future. The total amount of E-Mart’s investment in the acquisition of SK Wyvern is KRW 135.58 billion. E-Mart explained the purpose of the contract as “customer inflow due to synergy enhancement and linkage marketing through enhancement of brand power such as E-Mart and SSG.com, and development of baseball-related PL (own brand) products.”
In particular, E-Mart is expected to actively expand awareness of the group’s integrated online mall SSG.com through baseball team marketing. E-Mart plans to expand online and offline synergy through SSG.com from this year in accordance with the non-face-to-face consumption environment where online shopping is the core. It is known that E-Mart CEO Kang Hee-suk, who has also joined SSG.com’s head office, is also frequently checking strategies between E-Mart and SSG.com headquarters.
SSG.com entered online shopping late compared to Coupang and Naver, but is showing a significant growth every year with its strength in fresh food. Last year’s sales were KRW 1.29 trillion, up 53.3% from the previous year. Operating loss was 46.9 billion won, an improvement of 35 billion won from 81.9 billion won last year, and the amount of transactions increased 37% to 3,923.6 billion won.
However, it is still not at the forefront of the online shopping industry, so it is essential to raise brand awareness and secure customers. Accordingly, the observation that E-Mart will use’SSG’ as the name of the new baseball team is also dominant. The strategy is to actively promote SSG.com to increase the proportion of online shopping as the next growth engine. An official in the industry said, “As an industry dinosaur with abundant financial power, it is expected to raise awareness through active investment and marketing and grow into an online distribution dinosaur that can compete with Coupang and Naver.”
/ Reporter Park Min-joo [email protected]
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