Datametrex's history with Lotte (the forest vs trees)Sometimes it's good to take a step back and look at the forest instead of the trees. A bit of a weekend read I've put together...
The COVID-19 pandemic has, perhaps, warped our perception of the impressive AI contract advances DM has made, over the past couple of years. Case in point is the ongoing land-and-expand strategy DM has implemented in South Korea, namely, with the Lotte Group; a multinational conglomerate corporation, and SK's fifth-largest, consisting of over 90 business units employing 60,000 people engaged in such diverse industries as candy manufacturing, beverages, hotels, fast food, retail, financial services, industrial chemicals, electronics, IT, construction, publishing, and entertainment.
For those unawre, DM's history with Lotte dates back 4.5 years, to March 2018 when it first announced that "...
the Company is in final stages of negotiations for implementing the Nexalogy based artificial intelligence (“AI”) solution, “Nexa Intelligence”, with Lotte Group...
The team at Nexalogy have done a great job positioning their tools to understand and analyze unstructured data in the Korean language, such that we can now offer Lotte and others the benefits of social analysis and discovery. We are pleased with the progress with Lotte and expect strong demand for our AI solutions across many departments."
In June 2018 DM won a second contract with the Lotte Group and wrote "
It’s exciting to see the strides forward the Company is making. The diligent work of the team allowed the company to successfully execute a ‘land and expand’ strategy, winning a second contract with Lotte...Conglomerates are an ideal platform for our products, allowing us to address multiple divisions with our enterprise solutions. The company’s ability to pass milestones is a real testament to the outstanding product shelf we’ve put together, and I’m excited to see the company continue building on the relationships."
In reversed chronological order (may not be fully comprehensive):
2022-10-06
$500,000 P.O. from
Lotte Home Shopping 2022-09-22
$500,000 P.O. FROM
LOTTE CARD 2022-01-06 $1.15M PURCHASE ORDERS FROM SAMSUNG SDS Co. AND
LOTTE Data Communications 2021-11-09
$750,000 Lotte Data Communication Co.,Ltd. and
Lotte Hi-Mart Co.,Ltd. (jointly Lotte) and Shinhan Financial Group (Shinhan)
2021-10-26
$950,000 CAD from
Lotte Data Communication Co., Ltd. ("Lotte"), Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. ("SAMSUNG"), and the Shinhan Financial Group ("Shinhan"). he P.O. from SAMSUNG and Shinhan is for an A.I.-powered task automation system designed to streamline and optimize banking system operations.
2021-08-13
$2.3M with
Lotte Home Shopping Co. Ltd
and $100,000 with
LOTTE Property and Development Co. Ltd.
2021-05-27
$550,000 CAD from three divisions of LOTTE Group (“LOTTE”), the Incheon International Airport Corporation (“IIAC”) and the Shinhan Financial Group (“Shinhan”)
2021-01-20
$500,000 CAD with the gross margin of $259,000 with
LOTTE Global Logis,
LOTTE Duty-Free Shops, and
LOTTE Home Shopping, LOTTE Super.
2020-08-20
$250,000 with two divisions of LOTTE companies ("LOTTE"),
LOTTE Home Shopping and
LOTTE Property and Development. 2020-07-10
$1 Million Sales With
Lotte Canon,
Lotte Supermarket,
Lotte Global Logis, and
Lotte Home Shopping 2020-06-20 DM announced that ".
..former executive from LOTTE Data Communication Ltd. (“LOTTE”), Edward Choi, joined the Company to head up the sales team in Seoul, South Korea. Edward was a Vice President at LOTTE for leading Lotte’s cyber security division."
2019-06-25
$1,000,000 Contract -
Lotte Home Shopping, Card, & Confectionary $ 757,200 ; LG Electronics
$ 178,000; SK Home & Service
$ 42,000; Hyundai Information Technology
$ 11,000
2018-12-18
Lotte Data Communication, the data informatization wing of South Korea's Lotte Group, forged an alliance with Darametrex wherein Lotte Data will utilize Datametrex' blochchain-based supply chain management (SCM) encryption technology to develop solutions such as cold chain service, a temperature-controlled supply chain service which is ideal for livestock products.
2018-06-19
$200,000 with
LOTTE Home Shopping, through DM's previously announced partnership with LOTTE Data Communications
A few interesting tidbits stemming from the above includes:
- DM's land-and-expand strategy works, with repeat contracts with Lotte Home Shopping (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022), Lotte Data Communications (2018, 2020, 2022), Lotte Properties, (2020, 2021) Lotte Card (2019,2022), Lotte Confectionary (2019) and Lotte Canon (2020), Lotte Supermarket (2020) Lotte Global Logis (2020, 2021), Lotte Duty-Free (2021) and Lotte High Mart (2021) - noting that 27 May 2020 DM made reference to a $550,000 CAD from three divisions of LOTTE Group, without specifying which ones.
- The addition of a Lotte Data Communications exec to DM, in June 2020, has likely contributed to increasing the number of contracts
- While I haven't taken the time to look in detail into other SK-based contracts (i.e. Samsung etc), it certainly looks like, beyond the Lotte land-and-expand strategy, that DM is also increasingly able to attract non-Lotte based business, including in large businesses in which it can replicate this land and expand approach.
Hence, when looking at this and putting in context the recent visit in Canada by the South Korean President, who explicitly stated wanting to strengthen AI business between Canada and SK, it all comes togeher and makes for very promising perspectives. In my mind, at least.
Pleasant long weekend to all.
Resilience19