I would love to hear your perspectives on their infrastructure footprint, especially compared to anything else you have observed during your time in Korea. As someone with an inside view, could you share insights on their scale, efficiency, and how their infrastructure reaches different parts of the country? Any comparisons or contrasts with the competition would be appreciated.

In contrast, at Coupang, the approach was extremely reactive. There was a predictive component, but the horizon was relatively short because they were much faster at adding capacity than Amazon. One project I worked on aimed to shorten the distance and time between product and customer. There was a warehouse shell available, and within a week, they brought in shelving from other facilities and set up an operational fulfillment center. In my time at Amazon, I had never seen anything like that.

I would love to hear your perspectives on their infrastructure footprint, especially compared to anything else you have observed during your time in Korea. As someone with an inside view, could you share insights on their scale, efficiency, and how their infrastructure reaches different parts of the country? Any comparisons or contrasts with the competition would be appreciated.

However, they became dependent on this capability and didn't see much value in long-range infrastructure planning like Amazon did. I believe some of the defensiveness I encountered when introducing the network model was because they didn't value planning that far ahead. This isn't a universal truth, though. Coupang was experimenting with significant infrastructure, like robotics, which requires long-term planning. But they were only testing the capability without immediate plans to expand its use.