Lotte Hi-Mart's recent change of CEO reflects a strong will to change the company's identity beyond simple personnel changes. Leaving behind the era of the ‘orthodox distribution man’ who had been in the field for over 30 years and carrying out practical tasks of improving profitability, the sudden selection of Kim Jong-yoon, a strategist in his 40s who had worked at Google, McKinsey, and a platform company called Yanolja, was a very symbolic event. This can be said to be a result of the desperate recognition that growth engines can no longer be secured through ‘store efficiency’ and ‘cost reduction’ alone, which were the success equations of the past. Appointee Kim's experience in innovating the business model at Yanolja by converting lodging industry data into service-type software is expected to play a key role in Hi-Mart's future evolution beyond a simple sales outlet into a platform that connects home appliance data and customer experience.

The summer home appliance promotion that is underway in line with personnel reform clearly shows how Lotte Hi-Mart is trying to tie in customers by utilizing offline infrastructure. The recent ‘Superhero’ special promotion goes beyond simply lowering prices and is designed to overlap the powerful promotional benefits of manufacturers such as Samsung and LG with Hi-Mart’s unique cashback and interest-free installments. In particular, a 20% refund or a direct discount of 1 million won when purchasing home appliances is a strategic choice that significantly lowers the price perceived by consumers in this era of high inflation. These complex discount benefits can be interpreted as a strategy to maximize Hi-Mart's unique strengths of being able to experience products directly and receive expert advice at offline stores while competing equally with the lowest prices online.

Lotte Hi-Mart’s survival strategy focuses on moving away from a ‘one-time transaction’ that ends with the sale of a product and a transition to a ‘lifelong care’ model that takes responsibility for the entire product life cycle. The recently strengthened ‘Hi-Mart Safe Care’ service and subscription model, as well as the introduction of AI shopping agent ‘HARVY’, are aimed at the ‘lock-in effect’ that makes customers continue to visit the Hi-Mart platform even after purchasing home appliances. In particular, the vision to target segmented markets such as one- to two-person households through its own brand (PB) ‘PLUX’ and to service the entire home appliance process from purchase to installation, repair, cleaning, and disposal is a concrete example of data-based management. This is an ambitious blueprint to become a ‘platform’ that provides total solutions for home appliance life, rather than a ‘store’ that simply sells products.

Of course, this process of change is not always smooth. The home appliance market is under strong pressure from the macroeconomic environment, including a downturn in the real estate market and worsening consumer sentiment, and the lengthening of home appliance replacement cycles is also a major obstacle to sales growth. In addition, since travel platforms and home appliance distribution industries have completely different characteristics, it is still a task that needs to be verified to see how flexibly candidate Kim Jong-yoon's platform success equation can be transferred to an offline-focused company called Hi-Mart. How to monetize data and increase the actual purchase conversion rate on the basis of surplus established by improving the efficiency of offline stores will be the decisive variable that will determine the success or failure of Hi-Mart in the future.