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Kakao Pay's employees, who are also investors in the company, reportedly lost an average of ₩20 million or around $15,600 after the firm's stock price continued to plummet since January of this year.
According to The Korea Herald, the employees own shares in Kakao Pay, and their stock ownership association in the company bought a total of ₩3.4 million shares at the price of ₩90,000 per share, and this was before the initial public offering (IPO) on Nov. 3 of last year.
In the filing, documents show that about 800 staff received an average of 4,005 shares each which was valued at ₩360.4 million at the time of Kakao Pay's debut in the payment market.
The IPO price was set at ₩90,000 per share at that time. It opened at ₩180,000 and closed even higher at ₩193,000 on the first day. However, each of the employees lost ₩20 million as the share price started going down earlier this year, and that was just two months after going public. Kakao Pay was said to have hit a 52-week low in terms of the closing price on Friday, June 10, with 85,100 and closing at 3.73% lower compared to the previous session.
The company lost momentum after the discovery that its former chief executive officer, Ryu Young Joon, and seven other execs had offloaded KRW90 billion of company shares by using stock option in December, which was just a month since Kakao Pay's IPO launch.
Meanwhile, The Korea Times reported that major brokerage houses in the country are revising the mobile payment firm's target price. For instance, Korea Investment & Securities presented the company's target price at KRW125,000, which is down by 13.8% from its earlier target due to the overall stock decline of Kakao's overseas counterparts.
"Kakao will become one of the biggest beneficiaries if the government eases restrictions on platform players," an analyst at the KIS brokerage house, Jung Ho Yoon, stated. "There stands a limited likelihood of internet firms suffering additional stock falls. Investors are advised to increase their investments in related companies."
