Coupang Stock Surges. A Data Breach Wasn’t as Bad as Feared.

A data breach at Coupang has thrown the retailer into turmoil over the last month. (SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg)

Key Points

• Coupang shares increased 9.2% after the company announced a data breach affected 3,000 customer accounts.
• An internal investigation revealed a former employee accessed 33 million customer accounts but retained data from 3,000.
• The data breach led to the resignation of Coupang’s former CEO of South Korea operations and a police raid.

Shares of Coupang rose sharply Friday after a Christmas Day announcement quelled investors’ worst fears about a recent data breach.

An internal investigation found that a former employee accessed 33 million customer accounts, but retained data from only about 3,000 customers, Coupang announced Thursday. The person did not share the data with others, the company said.

Coupang stock jumped 9.2% on Friday, giving the retailer a boost before the turn of the year.

The data breach has thrown the company into turmoil over the past month. Coupang’s former CEO of South Korea operations resigned, and local police raided the company’s Seoul office earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Often considered South Korea’s equivalent of Amazon.com, Coupang holds personal information on the vast majority of the country’s adult population. The announcement that the perpetrator kept just a fraction of those records could help the retailer rebuild trust among its customers.

Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com