South Korea Fines Baemin and Coupang $463 Million for Squeezing Restaurants
South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission announced on Monday that it had decided to impose corrective orders and provisional fines totaling 631.9 billion won, roughly $463 million, on the country’s two dominant food-delivery platforms. The October 29 decision, publicly released November 9, assigns 331.1 billion won to Woowa Brothers, operator of Baemin, and 300.8 billion won to Coupang, operator of Coupang Eats. The regulator says both companies used market power to narrow restaurants’ freedom to set prices and terms.
At the center of the case are so-called most-favored-nation requirements. Coupang demanded six conditions, including menu prices, discounts, minimum orders and customer delivery fees, that could not be less favorable than those on rival apps. Baemin imposed comparable conditions on restaurants using its own-delivery service. Yonhap reported that restaurants which did not comply risked losing access to membership-linked promotions that had become important channels for orders.
How the platforms tightened control
The pressure worked. According to the commission, the share of participating restaurants meeting Coupang’s requirements rose from about 13 percent in July 2023 to 94 percent in October 2025. The equivalent share for Baemin Club stores climbed from 63 percent in May 2024 to 80 percent by January 2025. By 2025 order value, Baemin controlled 58.45 percent of the delivery-app market and Coupang Eats 34.44 percent—a combined 92.89 percent.
Baemin faced additional penalties for steering restaurants away from its marketplace service, where shops arrange delivery themselves, and toward the platform’s own-delivery system. The commission estimated that Baemin captured revenue equal to 28 percent of transaction value on own-delivery orders in 2024, compared with 7.8 percent on marketplace orders. It also found that the app reduced marketplace visibility and displayed estimated delivery times in ways that made that option appear slower.
Restaurants carried the costs
Those design choices matter because a platform does not have to dictate every menu price directly to shape what customers pay. When restaurants face higher commissions, lose access to high-traffic membership programs or cannot offer a better deal on a lower-cost rival app, the pressure moves through minimum orders, delivery charges and menu prices. The regulator said the shift toward Baemin’s own-delivery service raised commission costs and pushed merchants to adjust prices to protect already thin margins.
The combined fine reflects more than a technical dispute over contract language. A most-favored-nation clause can convert two nominal competitors into a mechanism for keeping prices aligned across the market: a restaurant that wants to discount on a smaller platform must either extend the same deal to the giants or risk losing visibility and orders. That makes it harder for new platforms to compete through lower fees and transfers the cost of platform rivalry onto restaurants, workers and customers.
Companies reject the findings
Both companies dispute the decision. Woowa Brothers said it had argued that its conduct was not unlawful and would review the written ruling in detail. Coupang called its penalty disproportionate, objected to the revenue base used to calculate it and said it would challenge the ruling in court. The commission described all fine amounts as provisional. Its orders also require changes to the practices, while a separate case over the alleged tying of Coupang Eats benefits to Wow membership was sent back for reexamination.
The case is a warning about the political economy of convenience. Delivery platforms sell speed to consumers, but their power rests on controlling the terms under which restaurants reach those consumers and couriers move the orders. South Korea’s intervention will be meaningful only if restaurants can actually vary prices, choose delivery arrangements and use smaller competitors without retaliation. That enforcement question now matters more than the headline fine.
Hero photo: Lbking / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).
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