Shinsegae Sibling Split Nears Completion as SSG.com Announces Spin-Off

Restructured into Two Entities: Grocery and Lifestyle

30% Equity Held by External Investors Also Acquired

Emart and Shinsegae Now Sole Shareholders

The process of separating business divisions between the siblings of Shinsegae Group is reaching its conclusion. This comes as Emart, led by Chairman Chung Yongjin, and Shinsegae, overseen by his sister Chairwoman Chung Yu-kyung, have decided to carry out a physical spin-off of their jointly owned e-commerce company, SSG.com, into two separate entities: one focusing on grocery and the other on lifestyle businesses. It has been 15 years since Shinsegae Group General Chairwoman Lee Myung-hee established an independent management structure in 2011, entrusting the hypermarket business to her son and the department store business to her daughter. Once the shareholdings between the two new entities are sorted out after the split, Emart under Chairman Chung Yongjin and Shinsegae under Chairwoman Chung Yu-kyung are expected to complete their de facto split, each centering on their respective core businesses.

According to the retail industry on the 27th, SSG.com is scheduled to hold a board meeting at 2:00 p.m. today to decide on the spin-off of its lifestyle division. The split will be finalized after an extraordinary shareholders' meeting in October and completed by December 1. Once the separation is concluded, the surviving company will be SSG.com and the newly established entity will be provisionally named Shinsegae Mall. A group representative explained, “The purpose of this split is to move beyond operating two platforms within a single legal entity and, instead, establish independent decision-making and management systems optimized for each platform’s business characteristics and growth strategy.”

This split marks a reorganization of SSG.com’s business structure seven years after its launch in 2019. SSG.com was created when Emart’s online shopping mall division, spun off as Emart Mall, merged with Shinsegae Mall in 2019. At the time, the plan was to combine Emart’s grocery competitiveness with Shinsegae’s fashion and lifestyle goods on a single platform to achieve economies of scale in the online market.

The SSG.com split is viewed as the final step in the business separation between Emart under Chairman Chung Yongjin and Shinsegae under Chairwoman Chung Yu-kyung. Since both companies held stakes in SSG.com and their business lines were intermingled within the same entity, SSG.com had long been cited as a major challenge to completing their business division. By separating grocery and lifestyle into distinct legal entities, both companies will be able to arrange their shareholdings according to each business in the future.

The business organization has already been structured around these two focal points. According to Emart’s semiannual report, as of the end of June, SSG.com’s sales organization was separated into the Grocery Business Division and the Lifestyle Division. The Grocery Business Division includes grocery operations and marketing, while the Lifestyle Division encompasses lifestyle operations and a dedicated lifestyle marketing team. In July of last year, SSG.com spun off its SSGPAY payment service division into a separate company, continuing its business structure reform. This entity changed its name to SSG Payments in January of this year.

Just before the split, all external investor stakes were also cleared. On August 26, Emart and Shinsegae acquired the 30% stake in SSG.com held by Olympus Jeil No.1 for a total of 1.2711 trillion won. As a result, Emart’s share in SSG.com increased from 45.58% to 65.11%, while Shinsegae’s rose from 24.42% to 34.89%. Emart and Shinsegae now remain as the only shareholders of SSG.com.

After the physical spin-off, Emart and Shinsegae will hold stakes in both the surviving and newly established companies. Once the shareholding relationships between these two entities are fully worked out, Emart under Chairman Chung Yongjin and Shinsegae under Chairwoman Chung Yu-kyung are expected to enter the final stages of their business division, centering on their respective areas. Grocery aligns closely with Emart, which operates hypermarkets and maintains a robust food procurement network, while lifestyle—which covers fashion and beauty—has strong business ties with Shinsegae’s department store and fashion operations.

With SSG.com’s restructuring, Shinsegae Uijeongbu Station Development remains a key holding connecting Emart and Shinsegae. Shares in Shinsegae Uijeongbu Station Development are distributed as follows: Shinsegae holds 27.55%, Gwangju Shinsegae holds 25%, and Shinsegae Construction holds 19.9%. Among these, Shinsegae Construction is a wholly owned subsidiary of Emart.

A Shinsegae Group spokesperson stated, “Through this spin-off, we expect to enhance the expertise of each business and respond more swiftly to market changes with independent decision-making structures. Even after the split, we will continue to reinforce our competitiveness by maintaining customer touchpoints and necessary business linkage.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.